Feature: Collections - Newly refitted - the Museum of London's new galleries
Published: 27 May 2010
by DAN CARRIER
THE rhino’s home was in Salisbury Square – albeit around 450,000 BC. Further to the west, lions – fittingly – roamed what is now the terrace in front of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square.
And while these creatures haven’t been seen in the British Isles since before the last Ice Age, they can still be found in the city – on display in the newly revamped, £20million upgraded Museum of London.
Opening this weekend, the new museum aims to tell the story of London, and curators have trawled through some two million objects to cherry pick around 7,000 that are the stars of the show. The rhino and lion’s skulls show just how long animals have made the Thames basin their home, but the new Galleries of Modern London, for which the New Journal got a exclusive preview, includes many more recent objects that help tell the story of our city.
“London is a global metropolis,” says director David Spence. “People have always come to London. We have traded with all four corners of the globe and the world in turn has shaped London. We hope this wide-ranging new show will illustrate that.”
The museum was founded 100 years ago by Lord Harcourt and Edward VII. It was based in Knightsbridge but after the Second World War, the museum was closed until 1976 when it found a home in the new Barbican complex. Now, after three years out of action while the builders were in – it has been revamped to make it a 21st-century, interactive experience with displays that will both thrill and inform.
The show is full of those quirky stories that make the streets of previous ages come alive, from the personal lives of Londoners to the roads, factories, homes and shops that shaped them.
There are the objects owned by the thief Jack Sheppard, who was a Georgian working-class champion for his daring robberies and even more adventurous escapes. He was due to be hanged three times but each time defied the hangman’s noose. Eventually, on the fourth attempt, he was executed at Tyburn, but admiring crowds tore his body limb from limb, to stop the Crown getting their hands on it and it being used for medical dissection.
Other sections deal with our homes, and include archeological projects that have uncovered what lies beneath the modern metropolis. As well as scorched bricks from the Great Fire of London in 1666, a mummified cat encased in the walls of a house to ward off evil spirits is one of the more bizarre discoveries.
There is a complete interior of Wellclose debtors’ prison with names scratched on the walls of a cell, while less threatening is an Art Deco lift from Selfridges. And the front of a Lyon’s Tea House, an everyday sight in the mid-20th century long since disappeared, has a space of its own.
There are lots of connections with Camden, Islington and Westminster. The wedding dress of the daughter of the headmaster of Highgate school is on display: the material is Indian, donated by the Thakur Sahib of Rajkot in 1931 to the head’s daughter. She had nursed his son when he had tuberculosis.
A painting of the old Bedford music hall in Camden High Street by Walter Sickert features, as does a bread ration from Holloway prison, given to a Suffragette on hunger strike. And through these trinkets, the new museum tells the story of Londoners.
“I hope people take away a message that London has always been, and is today, a tolerant and liberal city, a place of refuge for people fleeing persecution, a city that holds those values dear,” adds Mr Spence – a high ambition that is fulfilled by the sheer breadth of the items collected.
• The Museum of London’s new Galleries of Modern London, London Wall, EC2, opens tomorrow (Friday).
Free, Mon-Sun 10am-6pm, 020 7001 9844
IMAGES:
Top: Bayswater Omnibus by George William Joy, 1895
Bottom: Alexander McQueen’s‘God Save McQueen’ pashmina, 2008