We Are London
Monday morning and so it must mean that it’s time for a trip to the Museum of London.
Lordy.
A quick rally around of the troops, and we soon had two London bloggers and a bit, all bound for EC2; the fine @Darryl1974 and, um, @AnnaJCowen both accompanied me to my favourite London museum.
What I absolutely adore about the MOL is that is *the* museum for Londoners. It has no pretensions to take arid artefacts and present them as some great moment of social history. It simply tells the story of London, as experienced by everyday Londoners.
Back in the day job and I usually visit the MOL a couple of times a year. There’s a huge gulf however in safely guiding the kids over to the Great Fire exhibit, and then having a whole Monday morning to yourself to see what else is on offer.
The recent refurbishment has somewhat passed me by. I didn’t see what was wrong with the old exhibits, and to be honest, after my Monday morning trip, I didn’t actually see anything new of great significance.
The massive sprawling map that greets you by the main entrance is a work of art in itself – nope, it *really is* a work of art, lovingly printed on to a vast canvas and spreading out to show the entire South East in micro detail.
We spent at least five minutes marvelling at the map, and then five minutes further coming up with a list of other London bloggers that I bet would spend at least double the time taking in the delectation of the cartography.
What then followed was a quick spin in the time machine as we raced from Roman London through until contemporary times. Men in skirts ‘aint really my thing. It was more of a gossip with the good @Darryl1974 as we ploughed through Ancient, Middle Age, Medieval and Jacobean London.
I’m more interested in modern day history, and so we took it at something of a more gentile pace come the turn of the nineteenth century. This is where the MOL becomes political with the suffragette and Trade Union movements first both appearing in tandem.
The Struggle for the Living Wage placard could equally apply to Lambeth 2010, as it did to old London town in 1910. Likewise for the exhibits depicting the appalling state of social housing.
Fearful or rejecting all that had gone before, it was still the 1960′s, ’70s and ’80′s that I was interested in. It’s a mighty long way from mini-skirts to Miss Dynamite, and I know which of these still holds more contemporary relevance.
The early covers of Time Out reminded me of the downward social history trajectory of the magazine. A poster for the Rock Against Racism gig at Brockwell Park in the summer of ’94 reminded me of my age. @richardgallon probably actually wore the original Stations of the Crass T-shirt on display.
Much of the new MOL appears to be of the dreaded interactive variety. At least this will keep the kids happy back in the day job, when they bore of the endless Great Fire images.
But it is still the old style exhibits that kept my interest. The MOL is the type of attraction that you can visit and re-visit each month, each time finding something new and fascinating. In true timeline fashion, @AnnaJCowen and I are fast running out of diary space to take in future MOL visits. Time to make some personal history of our own…













