Last week I was able to visit the reopened Hunterian Museum at the Royal College Of Surgeons on Lincoln’s Inn Field. This is an anatomical, pathology and natural history collection originally started by 18th-century Scottish surgeon John Hunter, who acquired thousands of specimens – human and animal – in his desire to understand the natural world. Here is one of my favourites, a cute little foetus of a sloth.
A sloth foetus
I wrote about the collection and Hunter’s motivations for Apollo and you can read that article here.
It’s easy to cast the Hunterian as a sort of sophisticated freak show – a place where you can see diseased organs, strange animals, skeletons and a large number of dead babies. And to a certain extent – or at least to modern eyes – that is exactly what it is. But it’s important to understand the collection in the context of the time, before X-rays, aspirins, anaesthetic and all the other miracles of modern medicine that we take entirely for granted.
Hunter collected because he wanted to understand and he wanted to understand because he wanted to improve. His curiosity and motivation (and his approach to ethics) is very similar to that of John Soane, whose own vast jumble of artistic and architectural wonders can be viewed on the other side of Lincoln’s Inn Field.
Take just a moment to think about that. Here are the two cultures – art and science – in the form of two collections amassed by obsessed and committed individuals, facing each other across a large garden square in a pair of incredible free museums, either of which would be the envy of most national or city collections. London is by no means perfect, but – much like the scientific improvements that Hunter’s inquisitive mind helped propagate – such marvels should never be overlooked or underestimated.
This was originally published by the Canal & River Trust’s Waterfront newsletter in 2016.
It was while working on Time Out’s annual pub guide in around 2000 that I heard the tale of the Camden castles. A reviewer claimed that there were once four Camden pubs with castle in their name – the Edinboro, Windsor, Dublin and Pembroke – and these had originally been built for navvies digging Regent’s Canal. The gist was that each national group – Scots, English, Irish, Welsh – was assigned a pub to keep them happy, or more precisely to stop them from scrapping with one another. It’s now found all over the internet, with variations. Sometimes, the Caernarvon Castle is included, and often they are said to have been built for the later railway navvies.
Original illustration by Leonie Bos via Paul Pensom.
It’s a great yarn, but if it seems too good to be true, it’s because it is. The theory is carefully taken apart in the November 2014 newsletter of the Camden History Society by David Hayes who points out that the pubs weren’t built at the same time but “gradually appeared over a period of 130 years”. The Dublin Castle on Parkway, now a music venue, is the oldest. It featured in rates books in 1821 and may just have been frequented by Irish navvies, as the canal was completed in 1820. But next was the Edinboro Castle on Mornington Terrace, which opened in 1839, two years after the railway line to Euston. Not only did this open too late, it had facilities – a tea garden and library – aimed at an upmarket clientele. The Pembroke Castle in Primrose Hill opened in the late 1860s and was probably named after its address – 1 Pembroke Terrace – while the Windsor Castle on Parkway was an off licence until 1953, when it reopened as a pub. It’s now a restaurant. As for the Caernarvon, this originally opened as the Pickford Arms – named after a nearby depot – changing its name in around 1870, possibly to join the trend, as Camden pubs became synonymous with castles.
Where then did this rumour came from? To seek an answer, I turned to In Camden Town by David Thomson. This is a diary covering a year in Camden in 1980, combining social history and personal reminiscences. Thomson spends much of his time idling with locals in Camden pubs – the Windsor, Edinboro and Dublin Castle all feature – and he also writes about the building of the canals. However, he never brings the two together, either to spread or dispel the rumour, by saying his favourite pubs were built for navvies. That suggests the story had not yet been formulated.
Of the canal navvies, he writes that “it is difficult to find out much about the… homeless thousands of men who carved the channel out by hand”, noting later that “public inquiries… showed their food, shelter and conditions of work were as wretched as those of the railway navvies later.” This was a dangerous and exhausting life. One accident near Camden in August 1813 saw a cutting collapse, burying a dozen men, several of whom died. “A navvy’s life was less valuable than a slave’s”, says Thomson, who says navvies were “like an invading army but without discipline, tents, billeting officer or commissariat.” Many were Irish and spoke no English. “‘They use only their Gaelic tongue,’ wrote one engineer. ‘And it’s by sign we direct them and thus they have little traffic with the English and keep them apart.’”
Of the railway navvies, Thomson writes. “Navvies were reckless in their leisure. They came and went to the next job in hordes, shared hardships and pleasures peculiar to their homeless life, helped each other in adversity, had a strong sense of justice, were loyal to the gang and to fair employers, and fiercely violent against those who cheated them of food or pay.” The navvies had their own traditions, including “broomstick weddings” – a marriage ceremony described thus in 1846: “It consists of the couple jumping over a broomstick in the presence of a room full of men, met to drink upon the occasion, and the couple were put to bed at once in the same room.”
Navvies were perceived to be heavy drinkers and sporadically violent. At a ceremony in Camden’s Cumberland Basin in 1816 to mark the opening of one section of Regent’s Canal, the navvies “were presented with several hogsheads of beer. Plenty of quarts and pint pots were provided, but not finding these large enough, many held out hats for a full up and drank copious draughts from those.” There were occasional fights – most notably between canal workers in Sampford Peverell in 1811 and Barrow-Upon-Soar in 1794 – as there was among railway workers in Camden in 1846 when a riot broke out between English and Irish labourers at the Round House that lasted several hours and left many injured.
A trip to the Canal Museum in King’s Cross brought more information from The Canal Builders by Anthony Burton. The canal navigators were, he writes, “strangers of uncertain origin” who carved canals the length and breadth of the country using spade and barrow, experience and muscle. Again, he notes how little trace they left on the printed record, as they became “such an accepted part of the landscape that writers and travellers rarely felt it worthy of mention”.
Originally made up of part-time agricultural workers from the English and Welsh farms, by 1795 there were an estimated 50,000 navvies working on the canals, “a mixture of English workers… and a specialised work force from Scotland and Ireland, specifically to work on the canals.” The Irish and Scots were extremely poor and these “roving bands of migrant workers” were much feared, described as “banditti… the terror of the surrounding country” in 1839.
And what of their living conditions? These sound uncannily like that of migrant workers today. Burton says some were encouraged to lodge in the towns in which they worked to defuse some of the fear and friction caused by so many unfamiliar men living close together but most lived in jerry-built temporary accommodation, travelling encampments of 600 or more, with navvies living in “a turf hovel” and subsiding on “dull plain food”. Some canal owners discussed improving conditions, raising places for workers to eat and drink, but only in the form of tents or booths. Many were paid in tokens that could only be redeemed at certain stores, invariably those owned by the canal owners. Would four brick pubs have been constructed for such poorly treated, poorly regarded men who never settled in a single place for long? Not a chance.
Camden’s Pirate Castle youth club – also not a real castle
A photograph in Michael Ware’s A Canalside Camera shows a group of navvies, dressed in rags, surly and exhausted. The navvies had a terrible reputation, but Burton is sympathetic. “Take thousands of poor, uneducated men, remove them from home and family, send them out to sweat away at hard, dirty and dangerous work, and you cannot be surprised if the end result is a gang of men who frequently find their repose in outbursts of drunkenness and fighting.”
Here it is apparent how – if not when – the story of the Camden castles was formed. Canal navvies would have been prominent in Camden during the first half of the 19th century. They were often drawn from the poorest Irish and Scottish labourers, bolstered by English and Welsh workers. Attempts were made to keep the disparate national groups apart as they were known to fight with each other and the public. They were also famed for consuming heaps of ale, traditions later continued manfully by the railway navvies, who enjoyed a terrific tear up in the centre of Camden in 1846. And so, from these disparate truths, a cohesive myth was born, spun by some enterprising soul with a rich imagination, possibly even a lubricated barfly, enjoying the continuing hospitality of one of Camden’s many, but entirely coincidental, castles.
The Pembroke Castle, Edinboro Castle and Dublin Castle can all be found around Camden Town. The London Canal Museum is at 12-13 New Wharf Road, N1 9RT.
It feel as if the underground is heading overground. At the London Metropolitan Archives, an exhibition celebrates London’s subterranean treasures. Robert Mcfarlane has recently applied his golden Iain Sinclair-does-nature touch to a book on Underland. A photographic exploration of ghost stations is incoming from the London Transport Museum. And at the Museum of London Docklands, London’s Secret Rivers have been granted their own exhibition.
Jacob’s Island, Rotherhithe, 1887. Watercolour by James Lawson Stewart
London’s rivers are persistently fascinating and resistant to erasure. Like so many Londoners, I have been on their trail for decades. I nearly drowned inside the Fleet. I walked the Effra with a water dowser. I interviewed architects, businessmen and artists who have wanted to bring rivers back to the surface – or, in a particularly fascinating case, suggested we acknowledged the new flow of the buried Fleet via a subway, an underground bridge over a river under a road. I have studied the objects taken from the Roman temple alongside the Walbrook. I have stood in the middle of roads, ears to a grate, hoping to hear the passage of the subterranean river. I could go on.
All of this came flooding back at the Museum of London Docklands, a clever exhibition that features much of the above and more besides. It starts by exploring the reality of London’s rivers – where they were, what they were used for, why they disappeared – and then tackles the far meatier subject of what they mean to us now. It’s an exhibition of two distinct halves, one archaeological and topographical; the second more artistic and speculative. Bridging the gap comes a wonderful series of large photographs taken inside the Fleet, which gave me flashbacks and daysweats from my own subversive submersion in the sewer.
There are stacks of books, modern artworks, maps, films and digital pieces. Among them is a terrific sequence of SF Said‘s haunted Polaroids for Tom Bolton’t great rivers book, taken at above ground sites along the course of London’s rivers. I always think they look as if they were shot through a film of water, as if the ghost of the river has infected the lens.
It was particularly pleasing to see my local river, the Effra, getting some good space. This went back to the 1990s art/political prank group Effra Redevelopment Agency, and continues today in the form of the decorative manhole covers that mark the course of the river. It’s also given its name to a regreening project, a small but worthy attempt to restore ecological balance to the city.
I once believed that lost rivers could be restored, acting as canals or ornamental bodies of water. Now I rather like them as they are, buried but acknowledged, a reassuring secret hidden in plain sight, out of sight but never to be ignored.
Secret Rivers at Museum of London Docklands until 27 October 2019.
After the latest fatberg was discovered in London’s sewers in Whitechapel in September 2017 – a 130 tonne monster that covered 250 metres – the Museum of London moved fast. While most of the fatberg was broken down by spades and high-pressure water and then converted to biodiesel, the museum was able to preserve two smallish sections for analysis, conservation and display. Fatberg! duly opens at the Museum on Friday February 9 and runs until July 1. It’s a terrific example of a museum thinking on its feet, responding quickly to events and then producing a short, snappy display that covers an important topic without resorting to hectoring or over-thinking. It covers the environmental impact and what can be done to reduce fatbergs without lecturing or wagging fingers, but also shows that London is facing a growing problem that people need to be aware of before they flush anything down the loo.
There isn’t a great deal to see, which isn’t a bad thing. There are some displays explaining precisely what a fatberg is, why they are problems, how they are formed and why the museum decided to collect a sample – apparently because they are “disgusting, fascinating things which mark a particular moment in London’s history”. The museum also proudly announces that ‘there is no precedent for collecting a fatberg”. Thames Water are co-sponsors and there’s a short video, some photos of the sewers, the tools and hamzat suit used by workers who have to break down and remove the obstruction, samples of biodiesel and then two chunks of fatberg themselves. One has broken into smaller pieces, the other is a solid and fairly hefty piece of native London fat.
Although I was slightly disappointed I couldn’t take home a small slice of fatberg for the mantelpiece, having to settle instead for some fatberg-branded fudge and a book about sewers, I was able to talk to somebody who’d handled the real thing. Andy was involved in the scientific analysis. He touched the fatberg when it was first retrieved from the sewer and says it was greasy and waxy, but has since dried to the consistency of a pumice stone and also lightened in colour as the moisture has evaporated. It’s also very light. Andy showed me photos of the museum’s fatberg sample from soon after its recovery – it was originally brown and damp, like dinosaur poo, with finger marks where people have prodded it.
The fatberg is 62%, of which 53% is the palmitic fat found in cleaning products and olive oil. The remaining 38% is 19% ash and grit, 10% water and 9 % other, which presumably includes solids such as wet wipes, nappies and condoms – all of which are a major problem for our sewers. London has suffered from an increase in fatbergs in recent years because of the age of our sewers, our changing habits, a growing population, carelessness and also possibly the fact we don’t use that much water – Americans apparently use three times as much as us – so there is less chance to flush away deposits or dilute them.
Nobody seems to know how precisely a fatberg forms or how long it takes for one to develop. Andy told me that a scientist at Cranfield University is hoping to raise sufficient funds to construct a replica London sewer where she can grow her own fatberg. This seems a wholly worthwhile enterprise and one I fully endorse. Until then, we’ll have to make do with studying the dried remains of London’s fatberg at the Museum of London.
I’ve not yet seen the Museum of London’s new Fire! Fire! exhibition, but I did speak to curator Meriel Jeater for a preview in the current issue of World of Interiors.
Jeater told me that a section of the exhibition would look at the conspiracy theories about who started the fire. Some felt that such a devastating conflagration had to have some supernatural origin, so blamed a God angered by London’s heroic capacity for fornication and greed, and its execution of Charles I. Others blamed a more corporeal other in the form of the Catholics, with a Frenchman, the obviously disturbed Robert Hubert, helpfully confessing to arson.
He was hanged and for almost 100 years a plaque (pictured below) was on the wall at Pudding Lane claiming that “here by the permission of heaven, hell broke loose upon this Protestant city from the malicious hearts of barbarous papists”. It was eventually taken down because so many people were stopping to look it traffic could not pass. For years after, people continued to claim responsibility, such as one man who insisted who was inspired by the devil and would do so again, and a boy who said he started the fire with the help of his uncle.
The exhibition will feature this plaque, while also looking at the history of fire in London – a resident in 1170 insisted that the “only plagues of London are the immoderate drinking of fools and the frequency of fires” and there were half-a-dozen major fires in the 17th century before 1666. It will then cover how the fire spread and how it was tackled. Numerous artefacts recovered from rubble-filled cellars will go on display, along with contemporary letters by Londoners about the fire. Finally, the exhibition the reconstruction of London, looking at the various plans, the new building regulations and then the reality of how London was finally rebuilt. Illustrating all this will be lots and lots of maps. “It’s hard to get your head round it,” said Jeater. “You look at it and wonder how people coped, how London was put back together again.”
I went to see the new Tate Modern extension yesterday and very impressive it was too. The extension by Herzog & De Meuron manages that rare trick of looking new and exciting while also reflecting the character and style its neighbouring building. It reminded me a little of the way the British Library sits so comfortably yet confidently next to St Pancras.
The interior is also neatly done, despite some very peculiar shapes in corners. There appears to be more public space than in the original galleries – although that may be because it was filled with only 100 or so journalist rather than several thousand tourists – and it feels genuinely sociable, as well as realistically industrial. The viewing platform on the 10th floor is great, although the vista to the south is sadly blocked by the hideous tower to the left of the image directly above.
The art was fun too, featuring some great oversized installations on the second floor, plus a mix of disciplines – including incredible street photography taken in Newcastle – and loads of women and international artists.
Naturally, this sensitive, thoughtful and exciting treatment of what was once Bankside Power Station got me thinking about its older sibling along the river in Battersea. Both buildings were the work of the same architect, Giles Gilbert Scott, and so naturally share a similar style, most notably the use of decoration on the brick envelope to dress the mass, making it more palatable. Some critics believe that Bankside is the better building, describing it as Scott’s masterpiece.
It is certainly a fine building but I’m not even sure I was aware it existed until it was converted into Tate Modern in 2000. I would have walked past it, sailed past it, looked straight at it numerous times – but the fact of its existence escaped me. This is not uncommon I’ve found and Bankside, for many, only became noticeable when it was turned into an art gallery, finding in its second life a prominence that had eluded it for decades – and perhaps this invisibility is something Scott should be commended for, as the power station’s presence on the river opposite St Paul’s was immediately and understandably controversial.
This is all in stark contrast to Battersea, a building that once seen is impossible to forget and which has always had a prominence you rarely find in industrial buildings, let alone their ruins. Only now, as Battersea disappears behind a curtain of contemporary glass and steel is that threatened – so while Bankside eventually found visibility in its afterlife, Battersea faces obscurity, with the thoughtfulness of the Tate’s new extension highlighting the brash ugliness of the new developments around Battersea.
As ever, one ponders alternative presents to that in which we find ourselves. When it became known in the early 1990s that the Tate was looking for a second building, having acquired a collection too large to be contained within the original Pimlico gallery, campaigners at the Battersea Power Station Community Group wrote to the trustees, suggesting they make a bid for Battersea Power Station, then still in the hands of theme park magnate John Broome but already in a terrible state. This, they argued, would make the perfect location for a new art gallery: it was huge, impressive, historic and directly across the river from the Pimlico site. Romantic as this might have been, Tate’s trustees – possibly alerted to the idea of using a power station by the campaigners – instead plumped for Bankside, which had closed in 1981 and facing demolition, for entirely practical reasons.
Inside Bankside before the art arrived
For one, Bankside is much smaller than Battersea, only a third the size. Secondly, Bankside is much easier to get to, surrounded by tube and rail stations, and even a new bridge to the City, while Battersea is strangely isolated despite its prominent location. Thirdly, Bankside wasn’t listed, making it much easier to convert -and later, to stick gargantuan limpet-like extension alongside, when it turned out the original building was too small.
Bankside was saved and the arrival of Tate helped precipitate a huge cultural change along that part of the river. Further west, however, Battersea’s struggles had barely begun.
Up In Smoke: The Failed Dreams Of Battersea Power Station published by Paradise Road.
The Museum of London’s new exhibition is undoubtedly something of a coup. Crime Museum Uncovered features around 600 items from the Met Police’s private museum, once known as the Black Museum but now renamed the Crime Museum. I visited the Crime Museum at Room 101 in Scotland Yard several years ago and wrote about the experience here.
What’s fascinating is the differences between the way a public museum like the MoL treats the same objects as the police museum. The shelf above is from Scotland Yard. It is located in an ante room before the museum proper and contains a selection of weapons seized on the streets of London, and above that a dozen or so death masks taken of the heads of executed prisoners. This is pretty much the first thing visitors to the museum will see and the ensemble is like a whack on the head with a cosh. It says London is full of criminals, this is how they will try to kill you and this is what we will do to them when they are caught.
At the MoL, the same material is treated much more sensitively. Only six or so weapons are exhibited, and these are placed neatly in a clean glass box rather than scattered higgledy-piggledy over an old table. The heads are also on exhibition, but some distance removed from the weapons, creating a disconnection between crime and punishment.
That is, perhaps, the only way the MoL could present this exhibition. I’ve said before that the Crime Museum as curated by the police is entirely inappropriate for the public and I’m not entirely sure it’s appropriate for the police as it is deliberately created to cultivate an air of suspicion bordering on the paranoid, a repeated insistence that the streets are not safe for policeman, that anybody could be out to kill you, using anything from an umbrellas to a telephone. It’s an attitude that goes some way towards explaining the deaths of numerous Londoners at the hands of the police.
The MoL also has to fill in some of the blanks at Scotland Yard. The Crime Museum is ostensibly a teaching museum – it shows coppers the history of crimes and how they have been solved. But the cases at Scotland Yard contain little explanatory detail – that is provided orally by the curator. At the MoL, by contrast, there is a fairly thorough, detached but instructive look at a selection of important crimes, showing what they have revealed about forensics, police procedures, detective work and criminality (many of the cases, too many, concern crimes against women). They also touch on several of the most significant crimes of the era, including the Krays, the Richardson, Derek Bentley, Dr Crippen, Christie and the Acid Bath Murderers. It’s all very carefully selected and brilliantly explained, with items well chosen to both inform and occasionally horrify. This is easily the best part of the exhibition.
The MoL then breaks away from these individual crimes to look at broader themes, such as concealed weapons, drugs, forgery, armed robbery and espionage. While the focus on individual crimes does not include anything from after 1975 to avoid distress to victims’ relatives – which means the infamous Dennis Nilsen cooking pot isn’t on show thankfully – the exhibits on broader themes go right up to the present day. That is largely so they can show items related to the July 2005 bombings in the form of reconstructions of the homemade rucksack bombs, something I found particularly unnecessary as these weren’t even from the crime scenes, which is a core part of the Crime Museum’s relevance. Authenticity is absolutely vital here – it is the raison d’etre of the entire collection – and if the items are not original, you leave yourself open to accusations of Chamber of Horrors style ghoulishness.
It’s a rare misstep from an otherwise sensitive exhibition, that ends with an excellent film in which policeman, curators, crime victims and professors discuss crime, the museum and its role in police life.
So that’s all good, but I still came out of the Museum of London exhibition with mixed feelings.
It goes right back to the start. The exhibition begins with a “reconstruction” of the original Victorian museum. But this is a reconstruction in the very loosest sense – basically, it means the items are old but they are being presented in a very modern way. That is far removed not only from the Victorian museum but also from the contemporary Scotland Yard museum, which does not look, feel or smell modern at all. The Crime Museum is old-fashioned, cluttered, chaotic and deeply depressing, and a genuine piece-by-piece reconstruction, or even a photograph of the current Scotland Yard museum, would have been a real benefit, as otherwise it’s impossible to discern the peculiar atmosphere of the place. Without it, the MoL are sanitising not just the nature of crime – which is excusable – but also the nature of policing, which is not. That after all goes to the heart of what the Crime Museum is about, who it is for and what that means to Londoners, and it’s something that is entirely absent from this exhibition – the one hint comes from the only item relating to the long history of riots in London, which is a police shield from Broadwater Farm that’s been burnt by a petrol bomb. What does that tell you about the way the police regard these inner city riots?
The Museum of London have produced a fascinating, thoughtful and thought-provoking reimagining of the Crime Museum’s contents that explores the nature of crime and law enforcement in London, but it does not tell the full story of the Crime Museum. I imagine Scotland Yard will be very pleased about that indeed.
I finally made it to one of the London Transport Museum’s twice-early weekend openings at their Acton depot. where they store the buses, trams and train carriages they can’t exhibit in Covent Garden.
It was brilliant. If you like that kind of thing.
(I wouldn’t like to say the event attracts a certain type, but these were the longest queues for the gents I’ve ever seen outside a football ground.)
I could have spent hours browsing the specialist books for sale, while the kids loved the model railways.
The following pictures are via @callyorange. And go to the next one in September.
This weekend, the grandly titled Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & Natural History opens at 11 Mare Street, Hackney. You may already know of Wynd’s whims. An intriguing dandy, Wynd is the founder of the Last Tuesday Society – a body that promotes the esoteric in lectures, salons and workshops – which included Wynd’s own huge collection of oddities and curiosities, acquired over a lifetime of inquisitive travelling and impulsive purchasing. Originally, these items were meant to be sold – Wynd is still a dealer in the weird, a middleman in this strange underworld of people that buy and sell the corpses of giant spider crabs and Javanese hen’s teeth – but he found “it didn’t work as a shop and it isn’t fun selling stuff. I had to keep buying and you can never be sure what will sell, it’s an endless cycle. So I thought it would be more fun to make it into a museum.”
These curiosities are now going on display as the new museum. And curious they certainly are. On the shelves are two-headed lambs, tribal skulls, dodo bones, plastic toys, lion skeletons, radioactive scallops, Victorian dolls, surrealist art, an artificial foreskin, a cassette of a John Major speech on the subject of red tape, a Victorian mermaid, convict Charles Bronson’s sketches, feathers from extinct birds, a giant hairball from a cow’s stomach and jars of celebrity poo [“How did you persuade Kylie Minogue to poo in a jar for you?” I asked, when interviewing him for Eurostar; “I asked her very nicely,” he replied.]
Impeccably arranged cabinets contain delight after horror after delight, some labelled, others entirely mysterious, but all put together in a way that implies the art of the display, the way these things look on the shelves, is every bit as important as the items themselves.
London has always appreciated the chance to gawp at a gruesome gallery like this. Wynd’s endeavor harks beck to the very first public museum to open in London at Don Saltero coffee shop in Cheyne Walk in 1695. Saltero, a barber, had previously been known as James Salter and worked for Hans Sloane, the collector who started what became the British Museum. Sloane reputedly gave some of his cast-offs to Saltero, who used them to attract custom to his coffee shop. In 1713, his catalogue boasted in terrible rhyme: “Monsters of all sorts here are seen, Strange things in nature, as they grew so; some relics of the Sheba Queen, and fragments of the famed Bob Crusoe.”
Saltero’s collection included such marvels as a giant’s tooth, a necklace made of Job’s tears and Pontius Pilate’s wife’s chambermaid’s sister’s hat, which had been made in Bedford. It was, nonetheless, hugely popular and by 1760 the collection includes priceless artefacts like the Pope’s candle; a piece of the true Cross; the Four Evangelists’ heads cut on a cherry-stone; the King of Morocco’s tobacco-pipe; Mary Queen of Scots’ pincushion; Queen Elizabeth’s prayer-book; a pair of Nun’s stockings; Job’s ears, which grew on a tree and a frog in a tobacco-stopper. Moreover, it had inspired other entrepreneurs, eager to educate the public in the wider mysteries of the world, to follow likewise. Among those following in Saltero’s wake was Mr Adams of the Royal Swan in Kingsland Road, not far from Wynd’s palace of the strange. In 1756 Mr Adams was exhibiting”the heart of the famous Bess Adams, that was hanged at Tyburn; Sir Walter Raleigh’s tobacco-pipe; Vicar of Bray’s clogs; teeth that grew in a fish’s belly; the very comb that Abraham combed his son Isaac and Jacob’s head with; Wat Tyler’s spurs and the key of the door of the Garden of Eden.”
Well then!
Wynd is an artist as well as a collector and showman, and his museum will double as a gallery, opening with a show devoted to early British Surrealists and including work by Austin Osman Spare, Leonora Carrington, Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff. His curiosities are also sprinkled with the occasional artistic embellishment, whether its sculptures donated by artist friends, his own drawings, fine work by the likes of Spare or Mervyn Peake, or more occultish fare, like “blood squeezed from a stone” or a box containing “some of the darkness that Moses brought upon the Egyptians”. These latter items are much like the imaginative exotica of Saltero and Adams, and also remind me a little of Yoko Ono, and her attempt to auction in London a ‘Vial of Genuine New York Tears’ and ‘Jar of Captured Cloud Formations over the Bronx’ to subsidise Norman Mailer’s Mayoral candidacy.
Wynd’s collection features a lot of dead things in jars – babies, dissected vaginas, stuffed animals, old bones, beetles, butterflies, intestinal worms – but he rejects the notion that it is simply a celebration of the macabre, a house of horrors designed to shock the straights. “Nobody’s ever been shocked,” he says. “If you are going to a curiosity museum you want to see dead babies, it’s what you expect. That isn’t what’s new, what’s new is the idea that dead babies and Furbies are equally attractive. It’s uncanny rather than macabre, it’s the juxtaposition of items, setting off thought processes.”
“I see putting everything together as an art,” says Wynd. “If you are a collector then the world is your tins of paint and the walls and cabinets are the canvas. Everything has to look right. It’s a way of trying to understand the world, but a world that has no meaning. It’s all the pretty things that show what an amazing place we live in. It’s also an attack on conventional aesthetic values, so we have a Furby, which is seen as completely valueless, sitting next to a rare and valuable skull of an extinct beast, sitting next to Chinese sex toys. I don’t recognise a distinction between high and low, it’s just if I like it. It also makes me laugh. I’m quite miserable and this place cheers me up.”
It’s not entirely clear how much Wynd enjoys his role as a collector. As he points out, most of us collect when we are children, but then grow out of it. The collector is in a state of permanent pre-adolescence, unable to move on, still fixated by those items that first caught his attention many years before. Wynd says that as a child his favourite places were the Natural History Museum and the Pitts-River Museum. In adulthood, he is still trying to locate that childish sense of awe and intellectual awakening.
He recalls being a student in Elephant And Castle and compulsively filling a garage with items he find on the streets – “I couldn’t pass a bin liner without opening it.” Later he moved to Paris and discovered that at the end of the month everybody’s rental contracts ended at the same time, and on these moving days treasures would be left outside every block of flats. “It was heaven.”
The problem, he says, is that a collection is “like a garden. It’s never going to be finished. It’s never done. It’s a psychological condition, it’s stupid, it’s pointless and causes endless worries.” It also gives us the Museum of Curiosities, for which London should be thankful. Go gawp, embrace the uncanny.
Britain declared war on Germany 100 years ago today on 4th August, 1914, and to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War I was asked to write a piece for Metropolitan magazine looking at some of the most remarkable items from the refurbished Imperial War Museum.
The selection includes items as varied as a mounted German pig’s head and Edith Cavell’s nurse cap. One thing I like about the IWM is that it is very good at driving home individual stories amid the context of immense global suffering and complex geopolitics, meaning you can find numerous, remarkably touching, small personal items in its collections, such as this postcard written on a piece of wood from the Western Front.
One of the favourite items I came across – or rather, which the incredibly helpful press team at the museum pointed me towards – was this decorated tin, painted by a disabled Belgian soldier in London as part of a fascinating occupational therapy programme.
The fascinating story of California House at 82 Lancaster Gate is recounted here, but in short the hospital was set up in 1914 by an American expat artist and writer called Julie Heyneman, who – like many in London in the early months of the war – was horrified by the casualties caused by the German advance into Belgium. California House became a refuge for injured, displaced Belgian soldiers who were taught languages and sciences.
Those left paralysed or limbless were encouraged to take up activities like painting, book-binding, wood-carving and drawing – anything that required manual dexterity. Objects created, such as the tin above, were then sold to Londoners, with the soldier-creator keeping some of the proceeds. A similar establishment, Kitchener House at Cambridge Gate, Regent’s Park, was set up for British soldiers. California treated around 500 soldiers, some of whom were able to return home after the war and make a living from their new skills. It closed in 1918.
The Great Wen 