Museum of London

I really liked visiting this museum. I had never really heard about it before though my guidebook did mention it as an oft-overlooked treasure. It is the largest urban museum in the world. Other museums like the British Museum do include some information about London but mostly focus on different sections of the world also. The Museum of London, however, focuses solely on London and its people through the ages.

Our speaker, John Cotton, is the curator of the prehistory section of the museum. His talk was a very interesting combination of the history of the museum and the design of the prehistory exhibit. The museum, built in 1976, is the result of a combination of the Guild Hall Museum, London Archaeology Museum and Archives and the London Museum (which had previously been housed in Kensington Palace). The Museum of London employs 150 people in the main museum and 150 people at an archaeology archives building.

The museum draws three main types of visitors: people who want to know more about the Victorians, people who want to know more about the Tudors and the Stuarts, and the people who want to know about Roman London. (I fall firmly in the last group.) Mr. Cotton's job is to draw them into his area and educate the visitors about a time period in which they didn't know they would be interested. In order to do this, he and his team took great care in the creation of their exhibit, London before London.

They wanted visitors to take home 4 messages about the exhibit. One, that the climate has fluctuated over the course of history. Two, that the River Thames was (and still is) very important to the city of London. It was sacred to the people who originally settled there. They offered sacrifices to the river such as spears, swords, coins, and even human sacrifices. Even today, sacred items such as small statutes of Hindi gods are being found in the river. Individual Londoners define themselves as South or North Londoners depending on which side of the river they live. Taxi drivers primarily operate on one side or the other because that is the territory that they know well. The third message is that people were individuals. Many times, we tend to think of prehistory peoples rather than individuals. The museum wants to put a face to the individual and make visitors relate to them. The fourth message is that the legacy of the prehistory people did not stop when the Romans arrived.

The time and amount of work that it took to put together the design of the exhibit will definitely make me think about how museums decide to display their items from now on. They carefully decided how much text was too much because they didn't want visitors to read the captions but never look at the items. The designers also wanted people to really understand how important the Thames is so they mimicked the idea of water by an entire wall lit with blue light.


I will definitely have to keep my eye out for other ways that different exhibits use light and color to draw attention to what they are trying to impart to the visitor.

Down the hall from the prehistory exhibit, for instance, was the Great Fire of London display. They used red, a color that many of us associate with flames, all over the walls and floors. You couldn't mistake the area you were in!

As much as I liked the prehistory display, my favourite part was the Roman section. I am just a Roman History junkie. They did a nice job of recreating scenes from everyday life.

And finally, would couldn't love a museum with a sense of humour? Where else would you find this on display?