Our Favourite Objects From The Museum of London

December 2, 2022 Comments Off

The Museum of London closes its doors this weekend, in preparation for the move to Smithfield where it will reopen as The London Museum. As London guides, the Footprints of London team have been inspired by the Museum of London over the years. We are all a little bit sad about the current site closing, even if we are excited about the possibilities of the new home for the Museum of London. With that in mind we have chosen some of our favourite objects from the Museum of London’s collection.

Stephen Benton nominated the lifts from Selfridges

The Selfridges lifts dating from the late 1920s are just stunning. It is hard to believe something this wonderful was actually in a shop taking people up and down to go shopping. It is like being transported to another world.

Rob Smith chose a Roman amphora – a storage jar used for carrying fish sauce

I like that this amphora, used for transporting fish sauce on board a ship bears the inscription “Lucius Tettius Africanus supplies the finest fish sauce from Antibes” Lucius was a Roman from Africa, so it shows people from Africa were in London right from the start of London’s history. And the inscription is also one of London’s first adverts!

Oonagh Gay chose the Lyons Corner House

London women secured more freedom with the opening of tea shops like Lyon’s. They could network and importantly, use the WC! Public conveniences for women were very scarce at the beginning of the 20th century. Suffragettes used sympathetic teashops to organise meetings and even plan for window, breaking expeditions. Discover more on Oonagh’s Suffragette City tour.

Marilyn Greene chose The Bucklersbury Mosaic

Perhaps one of the most striking items in the Museum of London is the Bucklersbury Mosaic. It may well have been one of the first mosaics I ever remember seeing as I came to the Museum of London and a small child when it first opened. And so began a love of mosaics and I have now literally seen thousands all over the Roman world.

It’s an amazing survival of a near complete mosaic from the 3rd century A.D. ( 200-250) in three sections. It has dizzying geometry with a floral design within in a knot pattern and surrounded in a star of overlapping squares. The apse like fan shape is linked to the main design by a band swirling acanthus leaves. The mosaic was discovered when laying Queen Victoria Street in 1869 and caused a great sensation in the press with some 50,000 people coming to look at it and has continued to impress ever since.
Marilyn has a number of walks which feature Roman remains and discoveries in the City.

Jane Parker chose the sign board worn by Stanley Green

My vote goes to the portable signage worn by Stanley Green, The Protein Man, telling us about the lusty evils of some common foodstuffs, which, ironically, took the form of a sandwich board. This quiet and inoffensive preacher travelled in almost every day 1968-93, excluding Sundays, all the way from Northolt, to quietly preach his findings and sell his leaflets. If you didn’t see him, you felt cheated. I’m looking forward to seeing this exhibit reinstated at the new Smithfield galleries.

Sean Patterson chose The Charles Booth Poverty Map room at the British Museum

Over a twenty year period from the early 1880’s the successful businessman Charles Booth surveyed the streets of London from a socio-economic perspective. He created a series of maps for books such as ‘The Life and Labour of the People of London’ which used several colours to indicate the degree of poverty or wealth on each street in an area that roughly corresponds to our travel zones 1 and 2.

The Museum of London’s Booth exhibition room is clever in covering three sides of the room in his maps, creating a wrap around immersive effect enhanced by a touchscreen with additional information.

Visitors are always fascinated, seemingly compelled to look up places they know, or even live, to compare the late 19th Century with now. As someone who conducts a series of guided walks in the areas Booth covers, using extracts from his notes as readings, I very much hope the new museum will continue to hold a torch for this important survey and create another, perhaps even more interactive, exhibition.