I went out to look at a small collection of thimbles and came back with opinions on a very large piece of embroidery.
CHELSEA, England (The London Prat) – A museum is the only building in London where I am happy to be told what to think, provided the information is on a small card at knee height and the lighting is flattering to bronze. I spent most of today in one, and I have come home with my feet aching and my faith in the printed label entirely restored.
Track one: the thimbles
The museum in question is a little place off the King’s Road called the Gresham Thimble Room, which holds about four hundred thimbles, a stuffed owl nobody can explain and a custodian named Hilary who has not yet decided whether I am a threat. I was there for an hour and a quarter. In that time I learned that a thimble can be silver, bone or, in one case, a regret.
Hilary told me, unprompted, that the owl was not originally meant to be part of the collection. It had come with a bequest and then simply stayed, as owls do. I said I had a similar relationship with a standing lamp. She gave me a leaflet.
Track two: the queue
Over coffee afterwards I read about the other end of the museum scale. The Bayeux Tapestry has been on show at the British Museum since the autumn, and by all accounts the queues have been as long as the embroidery. ITV News reported on the changes the museum made: an audio guide, clearer signs, extra seating, longer opening hours and more widely spread timed bookings. Some visitors were turned away because of backlogs and offered refunds or a priority slot, and photographs of the tapestry are no longer allowed because taking them was causing delays. It stays until next July.
I admire the photo ban more than I can say. There are few finer sights than a line of people holding up phones to a piece of cloth that has survived for nine centuries in order to appear, in due course, on a phone. The tapestry has outlasted kings, wars and a great many damp cupboards, and it must now outlast the fear that somebody’s thumb is in the shot.
Extra seating is the unsung reform. The first duty of any institution is to let visitors sit. Everything else, the audio guides and the signage and the timed slots, is just a matter of arranging the chairs.
Track three: the giants
I took a bus home as far as the river and stood for a time looking at the water. This is the point in any diary where a London writer is required to mention Gog and Magog, and I shall not disappoint. The two giants, who are said to guard the City, have been carried in the Lord Mayor’s procession for centuries in the form of towering figures. In the old story they were the last survivors of a race of giants, brought to London in chains, and put to work as porters at the royal palace. I find this the most London thing I have ever heard: even the mythical beings were given a job and a pass.
The Lord Mayor’s Coach is among the star turns of a brand new museum. The London Museum has announced that its Smithfield site opens at the end of this month, in the Victorian General Market, with free permanent galleries. The collection of about seven million objects includes the Whitechapel Fatberg, the Lord Mayor’s Coach, Banksy’s Piranhas and the Cheapside Hoard. If you want a fair picture of London, a fatberg and a golden coach in one building is about as fair as you will get.
The restoration of the market took roughly a decade and cost 437 million pounds. I would like to see that sum applied to my boiler, but I accept that the fatberg has a greater claim on posterity.
Track four: the gift shop
No museum visit is complete without a visit to the shop, so I did my research online. ianVisits has gathered the Christmas jumpers from London’s museums and galleries, and I am thrilled to report that the Houses of Parliament sells one showing central London in a snow globe, with snowflakes and portcullises, at 45 pounds. The Natural History Museum has a dinosaur skeleton on the front, also at 45 pounds. The Royal Opera House sells one for 60 pounds. The Science Museum, with spacemen, is a relative bargain at 35 pounds.
Forty-five pounds for a jumper is quite a lot of money, and I note that farm.fm has a report on a political party that calls farmers real Americans but skips the real money. The two stories have nothing to do with each other, except that in both cases someone is being asked to wear the label and pay for the privilege.
My friend Marguerite from the second floor has already ordered the portcullis one. She says it is the only garment that makes a political statement and keeps her warm. I told her that the portcullis is a gate that drops down and shuts out the public, and that it is therefore the perfect emblem. She said that was exactly why she wanted it.
Evening
I ended the day on the sofa with tea, a leaflet about thimbles and no plans to queue for anything. The nice thing about a small museum is that it lets you leave. The nice thing about a large one is that it lets you tell people you went. I am not sure which I prefer, but I know which one has the owl.
If you enjoy my wanderings, you will find more of my daily notes at The London Prat. For a different kind of tour, try English news, dispatched without a smile or a London humour site that takes the long way round.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/