London Museum
London Museum is a museum in London, covering the history of the city from prehistoric to modern times, with a particular focus on social history. The Museum of London was formed in 1976 by amalgamating the collection previously held by the City Corporation at the Guildhall Museum and that of the London Museum. From 1976 to 2022, its main site was in the City of London on London Wall, close to the Barbican Centre, part of the Barbican complex of buildings created in the 1960s and 1970s to redevelop a bomb-damaged area of the city. In 2015, the museum revealed plans to move to the General Market Building at the nearby Smithfield site. Reasons for the proposed move included the claim that the current site was difficult for visitors to find, and that by expanding, from 17,000 square metres to 27,000, a greater proportion of the museum's collection could be placed on display. In December 2022, the museum permanently closed its site at London Wall in preparation for reopening in 2026 at Smithfield Market. The museum changed its name and branding to "London Museum" in July 2024 in advance of the move.
The museum has the largest urban history collection in the world, with more than six
million objects. It is primarily concerned with the social history of London and its inhabitants throughout time. Its collections include archaeological material, such as flint handaxes from the prehistoric Thames Valley, marble statues from a Roman temple called the London Mithraeum, and a cache of Elizabethan and Jacobean jewellery called the Cheapside Hoard. Its modern collections include large amounts of decorative objects, clothing and costumes, paintings, prints and drawings, social history objects, and oral histories. The museum continues to collect contemporary objects, such as the Whitechapel fatberg and the Trump baby blimp.
The museum is part of a group that also includes two other locations: London Museum Docklands, which is based in West India Quay and remains open to the public; and the Museum of London Archaeological Archive, based at Mortimer Wheeler House. The museum is jointly controlled and funded by the City of London Corporation and the Greater London Authority. Its current director is Sharon Ament.
History
The Guildhall Museum (1826–1976)
One of the two museums that were merged to form the Museum of London was the Guildhall Museum, founded by the City of London Corporation in 1826 when it received the gift of a Roman mosaic from Tower Street as "a suitable place for the reception of such Antiquities as relate to the City of London and Suburbs". As the collection grew, it was given a room in the London Guildhall. The museum focused on archaeological remains from the city, and objects linked to the corporation, and had a particularly strong collection of Roman objects. It was mostly inaccessible to the public until 1872, when work was begun on dedicated premises in Basinghall Street. During World War II, the museum closed so that the corporation could use the building for other purposes, and after the war, in 1955, it re-opened in the Royal Exchange. However, this was not seen as a satisfactory long-term solution, and in 1960 the museum seriously started to engage with the scheme to merge with the London Museum.The London Museum (1912–1976)
The museum has its origins in, and derives much of its collection from, the London Museum, founded in 1911 by Viscount Esher and Lewis Harcourt, 1st Viscount Harcourt and originally based in the State Apartments of Kensington Palace. It first opened to the public on 8 April 1912. Harcourt became the first Commissioner of Works, and the first Keeper was Guy Francis Laking. In 1913, it became a National Museum.In 1914, it moved to Lancaster House, which had been bought by William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme, soap magnate and founder of the model town of Port Sunlight, and given to the nation as a home for the London Museum. Visitors travelled through a mostly chronological route, entering the Prehistoric Room, the Roman Room, the Saxon and Early Norman Gallery, the Mediaeval Room, and finally a Jewellery Room before heading to the upper floor. Here, they would find the Tudor Room, the Early Seventeenth Century, the Late Seventeenth Century, a room with a large collection of porcelain, the Late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Room, and finally, the Costume Gallery. The museum also contained a basement which contained come exhibits from all eras, some of which were too large for the main galleries, and which could serve as an introduction to the collections. It included a Roman boat, a carriage belonging to the Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, a parlour decorated in the Stuart style, and prison cells.
The Keeper of the London Museum from 1926 to 1944, Sir Mortimer Wheeler, proposed merging the London Museum with the Guildhall Museum as early as 1927, as the two museums had a significant overlap in their collections, but the scheme was not given serious thought until after both museums had been forced to close during World War II.
During the war, the museum closed, and in 1945 it vacated Lancaster House so that the government could use the space for hospitality events. The trustees considered several sites for the new museum, including Holland House and various sites on the South Bank. However, in the end, King George VI leased part of Kensington Palace for the museum to move back in. The new site opened in 1951.
The Kensington Palace museum kept a generally chronological structure to its layout, but alongside the rooms devoted to various time periods, there were separate galleries for historical shop fronts; prints; theatre; glass; paintings, toys and games; and royal costume. The glass room included Sir Richard Garton's collection of 437 pieces of 17th–19th century table glass, including goblets, wine glasses, bowls, candlesticks and decanters. The Print Room comprised around 3,000 watercolours and drawings and 7,000 prints, including a view of Whitehall and Westminster by Hendrick Danckerts made c.1675, The Cries of London by Paul Sandby, and works by Thomas Rowlandson, Wenceslaus Hollar, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. The Theatre room included many theatrical costumes, several on loan from the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. These included Henry Irving's costumes for Malvolio and King Lear, the dress Anna Pavlova wore as The Dying Swan, and Ivor Novello's costume from The King's Rhapsody. There was also a clown costume worn by the comedy pioneer Joseph Grimaldi, a piano belonging to W. S. Gilbert, a death mask of David Garrick, and Walter Lambert's Popularity, a painting of dozens of music hall and variety stars. By the 1970s, multiple coronation robes were on display, from 1838, 1902, 1911, and 1937. There were also other items of royal clothing belonging to Charles I, a collection of Queen Victoria's dresses, and Princess Margaret's wedding dress designed by Norman Hartnell.
In 1960, a plan was formed to merge the London Museum with the Guildhall Museum, to be funded jointly by the government, the City of London Corporation, and the Greater London Council. An act of Parliament, the , was passed to this effect in 1965. The City of London Corporation provided a site near what is now the Barbican Centre.
Museum of London (1976–2022)
The new site for the museum was at the corner of London Wall and Aldersgate Street, an area that had almost entirely been flattened by bombing in The Blitz. The architects appointed to oversee the construction of the new museum building were Philip Powell and Hidalgo Moya, who designed a complex with four main parts: a tower block containing offices and not open to the public; two floors of exhibition space arranged around a courtyard; a lecture theatre and education wing; and a rotunda containing a small garden and restaurant. With the museum galleries themselves, Powell and Moya adopted an innovative approach to museum design, whereby the galleries were laid out so that there was only one route through the museum – from the prehistoric period to the modern galleries. As in the previous incarnation of the museum, the galleries would be set out in a roughly chronological order. The building also incorporated a viewing window out onto one of the remaining pieces of London's city wall, originally built by the Romans around three sides of the city. Construction began in April 1971, with the foundation stone laid by the Queen Mother on 29 March 1973, and the museum was opened in December 1976 by Queen Elizabeth II as part of the Barbican Estate.As in the London Museum, visitors entered a series of rooms set out in chronological order, moving anti-clockwise around the main courtyard on the upper floor through London's history up to the Great Fire in 1666, and then descending to the lower level and moving clockwise around the courtyard up to the present day. Visitors would finish their visit by the Lord Mayor of London's State Coach.
In November 2002, the previous The Thames In Prehistory gallery was replaced with an entirely new display titled London Before London.
A £20 million redevelopment called the "Galleries of Modern London" was completed in May 2010, the museum's biggest investment since opening in 1976. The redesign, by London-based architects Wilkinson Eyre, comprised the entire lower floor of the main galleries, covering the period from the 1670s to the present day. The Galleries of Modern London displayed a total of 7,000 objects. Star exhibits included a mummified cat, a 1928 Art Deco lift from Selfridges department store on Oxford Street, and a complete 18th century debtors' prison cell covered in graffiti.
The transformation included four new galleries. The Expanding City gallery covered the period 1670–1850. People's City addressed 1850–1940s, including a "Victorian Walk" displaying some of the museum's real office and shop frontages and interiors; objects relating to the suffragette movement; and pages of Charles Booth's 1888 "poverty map", colour-coding London's streets according to the relative wealth of their inhabitants. World City was the gallery containing objects dating from the 1950s to the present day, including 1950s suits, a Mary Quant dress from the 1960s, Biba fashion in the 1970s, outfits from London's punk scene, and a pashmina from Alexander McQueen's 2008 collection. Finally, the City Gallery featured large, street-level windows along London Wall that allowed passers-by to view the Lord Mayor of London's State Coach, which takes to the streets each November for the Lord Mayor's Show.
In 2014, the museum opened a new gallery displaying the cauldron from the 2012 Summer Olympics. The cauldron was made up of 204 steel stems, each tipped with a copper "petal", which could be raised or lowered to create various formations. When all the petals were raised to their full height, they together formed the shape of a cauldron. The gallery featured 97 of the original stems, wooden moulds for the copper petals, Great Britain's Paralympic petal, and footage showing the cauldron in use during the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympiad. The room also showed interviews with some of the creators, including lead designer Thomas Heatherwick and an engineer called Gemma Webster.