Inside the Museum of London

Victorian Valentine cards were experimental and eye catching. At this time of year London stationers put on enormous, impressive displays of valentine cards in their shop windows. When the pre-paid penny post system came in valentines could be posted anonymously, and London’s stationers experimented with thousands of ideas for cards. London valentines were so popular that they were exported to the USA.  London produced valentines that were romantic, humorous, cryptic and even insulting.  Some were even a precursor to LOLcats. Some were downright weird.  A huge variety of cards were designed for all tastes and budgets. The Museum of London has a large collection that includes some really unusual examples, like this roller skating cupid.

"Ere CUPID wore the nimble wheel, Which supersedes the glittering steel, Yet scarcely proves so safe a keel, And went a-RINKING He launched a dart and wounded me, My sweet, the bolt was tipped with thee, And so I met it lovingly, Without once SHRINKING"

By the late nineteenth century, when this card was made, roller skating was a big craze in London. ‘Rinkomania’ struck the capital, and roller rinks opened around London. Skates were advertised for children and adults, and the roller rinks were a new opportunity for men and women to socialize. One observer described how “In the use of these wheeled skates some of the men have gained great proficiency, but I saw no fancy skating amongst the ladies” (from The Graphic, April 1875, source) – it certainly can’t have been easy performing tricks in skates and dresses. Despite the difficulties, The Graphic’s reporter also wrote that ‘no-one was so ill-bred as to tumble.’ Perhaps this card was for someone who did not tumble, but fell in love at the rink instead.

The Inspiring London space is currently home to a display of photographic work by acclaimed photographer Dorothy Bohm. The display is called Women in Focus and the title is pretty self explanatory. We have lots of great work by Dorothy in the collection and this display gave us a good excuse to use her approach as inspiration for our own creativity.

To do this, we roped in the skills of the talented and wonderfully fizzy artist, Edori Fertig. Not only is Edori an artist in her own right but she also knows Dorothy. They met through her daughter, curator Monica Bohm-Ducen when Edori displayed her work in an exhibition about Jewish female identity called the Rubies and Rebels. So, a good person to introduce us to Dorothy. And also someone it’s great to be around. Edori is part of a collective called the Skip Sisters, so named because they make art from things they collect from skips. It’s so much fun. One thing she makes is oyster card wallets, and it was these we made ourselves on Tuesday.

Layered and layered by participant Cesearea

Edori took us around the exhibition, and showed us that there are some key principals in all of Dorothy’s work. We were encouraged to find these in the work on show in Women in Focus. Firstly, the colour red.

Secondly, the voyeur, or onlooker. This is either a person, or something more subtle like a face on a poster, or within another image. In the photograph below the onlooker is almost hidden. Can you see her?

And finally, layers.

Can you see how these were interpreted and deconstructed in the response work below? That’s the high brow bit. The less high brow bit is how much fun we had making oyster card holders!

London re-envisaged

Making links to when women were fighting to be in focus

The above wallet uses material from our collection relating to the suffragette campaign. Making links to when women were fighting to be in focus, it reads (from right side to left):

Special Note!!

The bearer of this ticket is called a Suffragette
Who tries her best the sexes to reverse
She claims to have a grievance
Which she’s nursing hard, you bet,
What a pity she has NOTHING ELSE to NURSE.

IT ALSO ENTITLES HER TO PASS OUT of her own house and neglect her domestic duties, leaving them to the tender mercies of anyone, while she is trying to get the management of the country INTO HER “CAPABLE HANDS” ? WHEN, HEAVEN HELP US!!

IT ALSO ENTITLES HER, at any moment, to ventilate her grievances, and to turn on HER GAS, but she must not SUFFER-A-JET to escape for more than six hours at a time for fear of asphyxiating her audience.

THIS SEASON TICKET ALSO ENTITLES HER to seize-on every opportunity to NURSE her grievances.

Playing with edges

Made by Sergei

Cataloguing the Museum’s collection of medieval pilgrim badges for Collections Online has been a great opportunity for me to look really closely at our objects and sometimes to find out that items are not at all what they appear to be. A great example recently has been a tiny little badge in the shape of a comb.

This little badge (no. 8737) was catalogued in 1908 as a pilgrim badge of St Blaise with the following entry: ‘Blaise, Saint; a comb, with double row of teeth, divided by a foliated bar in the centre; 13th-14th century’. It was found at Dowgate Hill near the River Thames in the City of London.

These comb badges were thought to relate to St Blaise as he had been martyred in the 4th century by being pulled apart by iron combs (before being beheaded). Some of the relics of St Blaise were kept at Canterbury Cathedral in a shrine by the high altar so it was thought that comb badges may have been brought by pilgrims visiting Canterbury.

While I was cataloguing this badge I double-checked its old record card, which had a better picture than the one in the 1908 catalogue. I noticed something rather odd about the decoration in the centre. What had been described as a ‘foliated bar’ (i.e. a band of foliage such as leaves) seemed to be a line of four phalluses joined by a wavy line. This was very intriguing. As I wasn’t sure whether to trust the photograph I went to the store to look at the object itself. When I peered at the object I realised the photo was correct – there were no leaves on the object, just phalluses.

So what did this mean? Clearly this badge could not have been a saintly souvenir. I knew that we had a couple of so-called ‘sexual’ or ‘erotic’ badges in our collection (one depicting a penis inside a purse for example). Many bawdy badges have been found on the Continent in places like the Netherlands and France showing all kinds of ‘sexual’ imagery but this type of thing is rare in London. In a catalogue of medieval Dutch badges I discovered a comb badge decorated with a copulating couple so obviously the link between combs and sex was not unknown in the medieval period. It was exciting to think that I had re-identified a badge from our collections.

I consulted with a colleague to see what he thought of the discovery. He suggested that it would be worth investigating whether the word for ‘comb’ in the medieval period had a naughty double-meaning. He thought that it might work as a pun in medieval French. Luckily I have a contact who is an expert on medieval French and passed the idea by him. He confirmed that the word ‘penil’ in Anglo-Norman (the type of medieval French introduced into England by the Normans in 1066) meant both ‘little comb’ and ‘penis’, ‘pubes’ or ‘groin’. There is an Anglo-Norman dictionary online where you can check this. He thought it very likely that the pun would still have been in use in medieval London in the 14th and 15th century. However, we don’t know for sure that our comb badge represents this double meaning – at the moment it is just an interesting possibility.

So why would someone wear a badge like this? It may be a smutty version of the beautiful ivory combs given as love tokens in aristocratic circles – perhaps the badge is satirising courtly love. There’s also a theory that badges with bawdy or lewd symbols were worn to distract the Evil Eye away from their wearers and could therefore have protected people against the Black Death. Other scholars have suggested that these badges might have been worn by sex workers to advertise their availability or by young men as a sign of their virility.

There’s still a lot of work to do on this and I’m only at the beginning of my research. However, it looks like the comb badges of ‘St Blaise’ are certainly sexual in nature and not connected to the saint or a holy shrine. I look forward to finding out more in the future.

By Meriel Jeater, Museum of London Curator

Over the last year I have been cataloguing the Museum of London’s amazing collection of over 700 pilgrim badges and souvenirs (that’s just the badges in the museum’s reserve collection – we have even more in our Archaeological Archive!). This has been a labour of love for me as they are my favourite objects in the Museum’s collection. I’m just going to reveal the story behind one of the pilgrim badges from the Museum’s collection but if you want to find out more about the badges, who wore them and why they were made, visit Collections Online. Of all the badges of saints I have examined over the last few months, I am particularly fond of those depicting John Schorn, an unofficial saint from Buckinghamshire.

John Schorn was the miracle-working rector of North Marston from around 1282 until his death in 1315. He was most famous as an exorcist who trapped the Devil in a boot. Schorn was never an official saint but his shrine was a popular pilgrimage destination in the 15th and early 16th centuries.

Head fragment from a John Schorn Badge

Badges of John Schorn often show him holding a long boot with a little bat-like Devil’s head sticking out of the top, in reference to his miracle. The Museum of London has 14 John Schorn badges, bought by pilgrims visiting his shrine. Whilst cataloguing, a particular fragment of a badge caught my eye. It was a saint’s head, shown by the halo around it, connected to something that looked a little bit like holly. The badge had been added to the computer catalogue in 1981 with the description ‘head of saint and foliage? With pin’. When I inspected the badge a bit closer, I realised that the so-called ‘foliage’ was actually a winged Devil’s head that had been bent upwards. It could only mean it was part of a John Schorn badge. After a moment of excitement, I started to wonder what might have happened to John Schorn’s body.

I knew we had several Schorn badges in the collection without heads so decided to do some digging. Whilst investigating one of the headless badges a bit further I discovered that when it was catalogued by the Guildhall Museum in 1908 it actually had a head. What had happened to it?

Headless John Schorn badge

John Schorn badge depicted in the Guildhall catalogue, 1908

I went down to the store and looked at the head fragment and the headless badge and, just for the hell of it, held them together to see if they fitted …and they did! Obviously at some point between 1908 and 1981 the head had snapped off the badge and the two parts had been separated. After doing a little ‘dance of joy’ I took the pieces to our Archaeological Conservation Department to ask if the pieces could be fixed back together.

Back of the devil's head fragment seen through a microscope

My conservation colleague Carmen Vida worked painstakingly to reunite the delicate pieces. Here’s what she said about her work:

‘When I started work on this badge, my objective was to reunite the pieces. This was a challenge, given the small size of the badge. It meant I had to work under the microscope to focus on very small areas, stick tiny surfaces together and introduce reinforcements. Whilst looking at the pieces under the microscope, I noticed two bits of lead folded over onto the back of the devil’s head and wing (see image above). The 1908 photograph of this badge showed the devil had one surviving horn, which seemed to have been lost over the years, but… was I looking at the other horn? I got so excited as I started the delicate operation of unfolding the tiny bits back, and even more so when I saw they indeed were one of the devil’s horns and part of the wing!  Putting the badge back together was an incredible improvement to the object but, for me, finding the horn and a bit of the wing was what really gave it back its character, as the devil looks much more like one now. It’s another way in which conservation contributes to the history of an object, and it was very rewarding seeing the object coming back to life in that way.’

Complete John Schorn badge

And here is the badge, complete again after years of separation. I’m so delighted that John Schorn has got his head back. You can see the record for the badge on Collections Online.

With panto season firmly upon us, digital curator, Ellie Miles, goes back 200 years to meet some of pantomime’s earliest characters.

Whilst working on the theatrical portraits for collections online, I kept finding the same characters appearing. In the left hand side of this print you can see Harlequin, wearing a mask. To Harlequin’s right, in blue, is the character ‘Pierrot’. Beatrice blogged about Pierrot costumes a couple of years ago. She wrote about Gertie Millar’s Pierrot costume, which Millar wore in 1909, but this print is from 1802, when Pierrot was just one the characters in the Harlequinade.

I started to read about the history of Harlequin and Pierrot. Harlequin was the star of the ‘Harlequinade’, a conventional part of pantomime. Although London had two official theatres with royal patents, it also boasted a range of illegitimate theatrical enterprises. The Harlequinade became popular in London’s illegitimate theatres, where exiled Parisian actors and Italian commedia dell’arte performers delivered comic mimes. Because these performances were mimed they were not considered serious theatre, so they were beyond the jurisdiction of the theatrical patent system.

Pierrot began life as one of the principal characters of the Harlequinade, alongside Harlequin, Columbine (Harlequin’s love interest) and Pantaloon (Columbine’s father.) The four characters delivered comic scenes, often making use of the commedia dell’arte’s batacchio, commonly known as the ‘slapstick’, which you can see Harlequin holding above. These conventional characters would have been immediately recognisable to the audience, and although their exact adventures varied, each had established characteristics. Pierrot was usually Pantaloon’s servant, and in London versions of the harlequinade, was performed as a naïve buffoon.

Pierrot was a simple character in London pantomimes, without the romantic complexity of his continental counterparts. Joseph Grimaldi was the London-born son of an Italian actor, and he revolutionised the role. Grimaldi performed this character as a clown, bringing influences from English comedy to the Pierrot role. It was so successful that it was not long before Pierrot was replaced by Grimaldi’s invention of the role of clown. Even Harlequin was eventually displaced by the popularity of Grimaldi’s clown, which became the central character. The Museum of London has several objects connected with Grimaldi, including some of his costume:

Grimaldi’s creative performances mean he is credited with introducing the modern clown. He was a specialist in physical comedy; particularly tumbling and falling, although this took a toll on his health as he aged. Many of Grimaldi’s innovations outlasted the Harlequinade, and shaped pantomime for years to come: he introduced the first pantomime dame and the tradition of audience participation.

Grimaldi’s clown replaced the Pierrot character in London’s pantomimes, but did not supersede Pierrot’s popularity elsewhere in Europe. Just as Grimaldi’s clown outlived the Harlequinade, so too did Pierrot, whose naivete became a sympathetic quality. By 1909, when Millar wore the costume and Beatrice takes up the story, Pierrot was not just a character in the harlequinade, but appeared in plays, ballets, poetry, fiction, music and even early films. Pierrot became symbolic of the sad clown, living on alongside Grimaldi’s rambunctious comic archetype.

To mark Disability History Month Curator of Oral History & Contemporary Collecting, Sarah Gudgin, revisits the memories she collected during the London 2012 Paralympic Games.

“2012 was a pivotal moment. 2012 was an opportunity to change the way people felt, and the way people looked at the Paralympics. And the wider implications that it would have for people with disabilities all over the UK and all over the world for years to come.” Ade Adapitan

For most people, the excitement surrounding the success of the London 2012 Games might have finished with the closing ceremony of the Paralympic Games. For me, it was just beginning. As part of the Museum of London’s Collecting Strategy for the London 2012 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games, I was involved in collecting material culture, costume, objects and new oral histories for inclusion in the Museum’s Oral History archive.

My interviews took me to new places including the Home Office, the House of Lords (which was a bit like being in a film set!) and the Olympic Village a rare opportunity to see the location where the athletes stayed during the Games – and I spoke to a wide range of people involved in many different aspects of the Games.

In addition to the 12 or so interviews which I carried out, I was also able to interview two former Paralympic medal winners, Dame Tanni Grey Thompson and Ade Adepitan who headed Channel 4’s Paralympics coverage with presenter Clare Balding.

Hearing the personal accounts of interviewees’ unique experiences of working on the Games was a fascinating insight into the organisation behind the scenes. Like most people who attended the Games or visited the Olympic Park, I had been impressed and captivated by the performance and dedication of the sportsmen and women and the spectacle of the Games. However, what I also came to appreciate though carrying out these interviews, was the intense planning, preparation, expertise and management which went into delivering the Games.

Many of the interviewees spoke about memorable sporting moments in the Olympics. However what also came through strongly during the interviews were responses to the Paralympic Games and the elite athletes who took part. Interviewees frequently spoke with great enthusiasm about watching Paralympic sport and about the impact that this had had on their perceptions of disability, and in many cases this was an unexpected response.

“It has been a rollercoaster of emotions, every single day, of every single event, challenging your perceptions, not of disabled people, but to what is possible as a human being. What is possible with a pure determination. It was fantastic, moving, inspiration and humbling.” Melba Palhazy

Some interviewees felt that the impact of the Paralympic Games would challenge the way we see disabled people, and they hoped this would have a lasting impact for future generations.

“We are not talking about people who are ill here, but people who’ve got phenomenal potential, who can contribute to society. The fact that they haven’t got a leg, or they sit in a wheelchair, or they are blind, does not mean that they are any less capable of contributing in their way to society. And that’s the power of the Paralympics”. Tony Sainsbury

Tim Jones describes the reaction of school children to meeting Paralympic athlete Richard Whitehead who has prosthetic legs. “It gave us a taste for how the public was going to react to the Paralympics and in particular how the younger generation was going to react to it, and they were going ‘Wow! We want to watch this!’”

With this years Disability History Month in mind, I returned to the Museum’s collections. It was challenging to find positive representations of disability without reinforcing negative perceptions, connected to the history of the freak-show, or viewing disability in coldly medical terms. Many objects or images collected were connected to war injury, asylum history, or viewed disability through the prism of philanthropy. Selected objects from the Museum’s collections relating to disability can be seen on the Reassessing what we collect website.

More work is needed in museums to develop new ways of representing the lives and experiences of disabled people. However through the new collecting which has taken place as part of the London 2012 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games project, we have, in a small way, been able to redress the balance. The objects, images, costume, ephemera and oral histories collected during the Games reflect the subject of disability more positively. These capture a snapshot of opinion informed and influenced by elite sport performance. The Olympics and Paralympics have created an opportunity to explore other ways of looking at difference, allowing us to ask difficult and searching questions, and perhaps to challenge forms of prejudice.

By Meriel Jeater, Museum of London Curator

Here is a brief snapshot of some research I have recently undertaken to understand the evolution of London’s city wall. A section of the Roman city wall still survives in a garden outside the Museum of London. I mention these remains on my tours of the Roman fort gate, which still exist in a room next to the London Wall car park. It is sometimes tricky to explain to visitors why the wall, while having Roman origins, is made mostly from Victorian brick and includes two medieval towers. The short answer is that over the centuries, as London’s population outgrew its ancient city wall, buildings were built up against the wall, gradually hiding it from view. Then in WWII, large areas of the City of London were destroyed or damaged in The Blitz. After the war the ancient remains of the city wall were uncovered in the rubble. The Roman foundations of the city wall still exist in several places at ground level but the wall above them is actually medieval or more modern.

I discovered that the section of city wall, next to what is now the Museum of London, had been integrated into a line of Victorian warehouses and shops, which explained the brickwork now visible. These were bombed in the 1940s and pulled down after WWII.

This is the current view of the garden with the remains of the city wall. The tower in the foreground is one of a set of medieval towers added to the city wall in the 13th century. Notice that the interior of the tower is now made from brick, which was added when it became part of the Victorian structures.

I always wondered what these shops looked like before they were wiped out so I could compare that with the view today. I hunted through the Museum’s image collection and through the many maps in the Museum of London’s Library to see if I could find out more. Here’s what I found…

This is a detail from an Ordnance Survey map of London, dating to between 1894 and 1896. It shows the area as it was before the bombing raids changed it completely. Where the Museum of London now stands was a street called Castle Street. If you study the map you can find Castle Street, lined with shops. You’ll also see a dotted line at the back of the shops on the right-hand (east) side of the street – this is the line of the ancient city wall. These shops enclose the city wall entirely – the city wall has become their back wall. You can also see the words ‘REMAINS OF TOWER’ amongst these Castle Street buildings. This is the medieval tower from the foreground of the garden photo.

I found another map from 1925 which noted all the numbers of the buildings on Castle Street. It showed that the building that had enclosed the medieval tower was number seven.

By kind permission of the Commissioner of the City of London Police

I searched the Museum’s object database to see if we had any photographs of Castle Street and this photo turned up. It shows Castle Street after The Blitz. If you look closely at the shop fronts you can see the building numbers – the shop in the centre of the picture is number seven. This is the shop that had the medieval tower inside. The back wall of all these shops was the city wall. I was very excited by this discovery. I can now stand by the city wall during my tours and hold up this image and show visitors the huge changes that have occurred in the area over the last century.

Here I am giving a tour of the remains of the Roman fort gate, which would have been part of the city wall. These were discovered during excavations in 1956. Parts of these remains (mostly obscured by the tour group standing in this photo) were found underneath what had been a gentlemen’s urinal in the centre of Falcon Square at the south end of Castle Street. Have a look at the Ordnance Survey map of 1894-6 to see if you can spot it.

To find out more, come along on a tour of the Roman fort gate remains on the third Friday of the month (free tickets issued on a first-come-first-served basis). Details are available on the Museum of London website.

In the fourth installment of Nickos’ travel blog the team make the tricky crossing from the Finnish border into Russian territory…

Day 4:

8am: We arrive in Helsinki and it is 5C outside. The A/C is unplugged from the boat’s mains and one of the fuses is burnt which means that the trailer is left without climate control. This could be a big problem not least because we are over 1,100 km (700 miles) away from Moscow. We decide to have it checked at the shipper’s warehouse where we are scheduled to meet with the first truck from London, the Finish truck. Indeed, the fuse is changed by one of the art handlers and the A/C is back on. Phew! We meet the Finish crew of the first truck and the other courier, the lovely Janet. We complete the immigration cards given to us and are told to keep them with our passports and guard them with our lives. At 10am the team sets off for the borders, two Finns, two Dutch, one British and one Greek.

It is a beautiful morning with clear skies and the sun makes the wet road glisten and the autumnal hues in the forests sparkle. Dark greens, browns, yellow, orange and the occasional red. Passing over a couple of rivers and lakes. It is my first time in Finland.

12.30pm: We drive past an endless queue of trucks parked on the road side waiting to get through the borders. Perishable goods and valuable cargo take priority so I can’t help feeling lucky (little do I know!). We arrive at the Finnish border and all six of us go through passport control.

6.30pm: We are through the border control and in Russia. But this is only our truck…the Finish truck is still stuck inside! This is what happened during the intervening hours:

The borders seem to span an area of several kilometers. We leave Finland behind and enter Russian territory. We stop for passenger passport control. The customs officer stamps the immigration card, checks my passport and then shows it to her colleague commenting on the pictures of Greek archaeological treasures depicted inside. It seems that they’ve never seen one of these before and I suddenly have a feeling of national pride. We then proceed to the next checkpoint where the truck is weighed. A few more stamps. We join hundreds of other trucks queuing for the parking lot outside the customs building. The drivers go to the road tax office and then to Customs, both in the same building. I am warned that this can take from two to twenty four hours! I secretly prey to the twelve Olympian Gods that all the paperwork is filled in correctly.

Two hours later the drivers come back. We have clearance and it’s taken record time! But this is only us, the Dutch truck. The Finish truck must be X-rayed in another building and then return to Customs. This is bad… We take our papers, which have been stamped and signed by several officials, more customs seals and proceed to the next checkpoint. Here another officer seals the truck, again. We join the border exit queue. Another passport control and then we are through to the OTHER SIDE! We park on the road side where two men in black in a Ford Mondeo await for us. It’s our security escort to Moscow. They wear dark sunglasses with cameras and I wonder…ex military, KGB, other (?). They speak only Russian and gesticulate a lot with big smiles on their faces. They put a third pair of seals on our truck and trailer. We all have to wait for the other truck to come through before we drive to our overnight stop, 360 km away. I try to dispel a feeling of despair.

11.30pm or 12.30am Russian time. We’ve been sitting in the cabin for five hours, longer than inside the borders. Kees, Kenneth and I are watching a film when one of the drivers of the Finish truck knocks our window. Hooray! He recounts what happened: after it had been X-rayed, the truck returned to the Customs office where the officers’ shift had changed and the shipment’s file had been misplaced. It took Customs four hours to realise that the file had been moved from desk 3 to desk 6, and then, to clear the shipment. We are ecstatic in our disbelief.

We finally make a move only to stop again at a gas station a few kilometers later. This time our truck has to buy road insurance for the journey. The price here is 50 Euros as opposed to 700 Euros if purchased in Holland. We wait for 45 minutes by the side of a totally dark road.

6.30am (or six hours later) We arrive at our motel off the Moscow – St Petersburg highway. The trucks park by the side of the gas station and we (the two couriers) are taken inside. The woman at the reception wants to hold on to our passports overnight and one of our Finnish drivers who speaks Russian tells us not to worry (I am not happy but I prey, again, that we won’t be victims of identity theft). There is a musty smell in the room but I have been up for 23 hours by now so I lie immediately in the bed with the faux Burberry linen.

Malika Booker, image copyright Naomi Woodis

This is Malika Booker. Amongst many other things, she is a London-based writer and spoken word artist. She is also Poet in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company. You can find out more about her here. I’ve admired Malika’s work for a while now so I was thrilled when she agreed to lead a workshop in the Continue Creating programme. She chose the subject of sugar, inspired by the London, Sugar and Slavery gallery and worked with us to each create a piece of writing about sugar. The finished articles are at the bottom of this post.

A good old bag of Taste and Smile

For most people, writing creatively is a little bit scary. We think we won’t be very good at it. We think we’ll expose ourselves. We think others will be better. When we did it at school it wasn’t very good and we haven’t done it since, thank you very much. Although she didn’t tell us, I have a sneaky feeling that Malika knew all of this, so she started us off we three exercises to ease us in. Firstly, we all introduced ourselves and told a little anecdote about our relationship to sugar, accompanied by an action. Stavroulla told us that she took sugar in her coffee, so did an action of someone stirring a cup. A cup, never a mug.

The freewrite rules, being demonstrated by our glamorous assistant Halima

Then we did a freewrite, which is a bit like a stream of consciousness. You have 2 minutes and you just have to write. And keep writing. Anything. Anything at all. Not necessarily clever, or poetic, or even coherent. But you have to write. And you must not worry about things like spelling and punctuation. After two minutes furious writing, we came back together to think about the many ways sugar plays a part in our lives.

Our mind map of sugar

Then, to help the flow of ideas, we had 10 minutes to go a bit mad, making collage with sugar products. We were NOT supposed to eat the sweets…

Brigette making her sweet collage

Once we were all thoroughly sugared up, we went up to the gallery.

The sugar cane panel in London, Sugar and Slavery

Malika asked us to explore the gallery, making notes of things that struck us, before returning downstairs to get more ideas flowing.

Panel in the gallery that lists the number of enslaved Africans on ships

Downstairs, we paired up to tell each other a personal story involving sugar. Richard told Gilly about the time he’d had 8 teeth removed in one go because of his sugar addiction… partially brought on by eating Frosties with tango! Gilly told Richard how she thought unnatural sugar was poisonous. Halima told me a lovely story about her dad, who would cut an apple into four equal parts every night before bed and give each child a piece to demonstrate that everyone was loved equally. This lovely ritual continued right into Halima’s teenage years. Brigitte told Stavroulla about making the annual Christmas cake, where every member of the family had to take it in turns to stir the mix and then prick the cake with sherry and Stav told Brigitte about eating hot apple fritters on market mornings as a child.

London, Sugar and Slavery comment card

The last thing we did was listen to Malika read some beautiful poems by other writers about sugar, taken from the Poetry foundation. One of the poems she read was Sugar Cane, by Alfred Corn. Please take a couple of minutes to read it, it’s not only beautifully written but also unlocks the themes of the gallery in a very relevant way. As Malika read, we sucked on fresh sugar cane, bought from a market in Brixton that morning and chopped into chunks for us by a very nice man.

Fresh sugar cane pre and post chopping

And then we wrote. We had 10 minutes, we had the tools that we had  learnt earlier in the afternoon and we had inspiration. The pieces are below. I wanted you to see them in their authors’ own hands (those who were happy for them to go on the blog) so I have pasted the pictures and typed the words below them. They are all great pieces and well worth a read. Why don’t you have a go at writing one? Grab something sweet, chat to some friends, have bit of a freewrite and see where it takes you.

Richard's story of the banana and chocolate pizza

I recall, as I am sat ensconced in biscuit crumbs around my table. A trip far away beyond the fields of Sevenoaks – where no light pollution prevails and no signal found for my mobile. A remote residential setting for my singing group: streetwise opera a couple of days or more away from society surrounded by folk songs and organic food! What a punishment, not even brown sugar can lift my spirits amongst the withdrawal of my junk food diet. But brief salvation in the form of a pizza making master class. A chance to create a savoury and “SWEET” one. Banana and chocolate is layered all over my pizza, a whole slab of a bar is used – so thick; the chunks don’t even melt fully. At last a chance to drown in my own sweet gorgeous gluttony! (Hand made!!!)

Halima's music teacher who saw melodies as chocolate bars

I remember my primary school music teacher, Mr. Mills, who described different sections in a musical melody as a bar of chocolate. He said, ‘think of it as a giant bar, which is easy to separate, as opposed to a great big slab of chocolate.’ I remember the class understanding straight away. It was a metaphor we can all relate to. We definitely performed better in that class, hitting the highs, the lows and the in-betweens.

Brigitte's ballad to the unknown numbers

It was 1788 but no English ship’s captain knew how many African human cargo it carried across the Great water to England

But to the islands still being fought over by French & Dutch and & English monarchies

It was 1789 but no record of the number of the ship’s human cargo from Africa, which sailed from Africa to the islands

It was 1790 and still the numbers remained unknown – the destination, mainly Jamaica

It was 1791, more rules, fewer rules but now a ship has memory and as it sets sail to Jamaica with 283 or were these 1000 and 283?

It was 1791 and as islands are captured not just Jamaica but other islands come into focus 131 but at once 394 (or maybe 2394) and in St. Vincent

Even St Eustatius with 216 or was that 21,600 received – the makings of the labour to create a sugar loaf, nipped at the head or hot chocolate

My synopsis of the afternoon

I can tell you about poisons

And teeth

And sherry

I can tell you about conversazione

and riflessione.

Of Trinidad

And stabbing at a swamp

Of shards and nippers

And equally divided apples.

I can tell you about figs and dates

Natural

Fresh or dried

I can tell you’ve had your hair tied

I can tell you about Frosties and tango

And the sweetness of Pineapple

Rum and

Mango.

I can tell you about whips

About sweets that are not for eating

And of the people who eat them anyway

I can tell you of seven souls, in one

room, on one day, sharing their sweetness.

And finally... Malika's masterpiece

There is a sweet agony in claiming you

blocks of white crystal, grown of brown

like God’s soil. There is a sweetness

about you that shape pure china. So

fragile, (so white), so delicate to be

sipped, little finger extended & what

about when auntie caught you, ‘a

little bit of sugar,’ they said. I searched

her skin every morning to see if her brown

skin became grains of you, not seeing

the price of you, how you break the organs

in the body like china, ceramic crashing

on to the wooden floor, you shatter the kidney

& bloat stomachs, you paint big toes

a purple splash of gangrene.

Did we not  heed how your parents ‘cane’ danced

green to the breezes wind, a field of

swaying care free bodies, but their

leaves would leave vicious cuts on

tender skin

How you cut us so deep sugar

darling yet we crave your

syrup taste like innocents walking

into a knife’s blade.

How many of us really know what goes on in the gleaming tower blocks and chaotic trading floors of the City?

By Lucie Parkes, Museum of London Secondary School Programme Manager.

Bishopshalt School were the first to take part in the Survive the City study day. One pupil remarked: “visiting the bank was the highlight of my trip, it was an amazing experience.”

Study days of this kind are new territory for the Museum. Usually the wonders of our Museum are experienced only for arts and humanities subjects, so it’s exciting to bring in an entirely new audience.

Being positioned at the heart of the City, it has always been relevant for the Museum to connect meaningfully to its immediate surroundings. Furthermore, the creation of Survive the City has added to the richness and diversity that our schools programmes offer.

The world of finance can often seem like a removed and mysterious planet set apart from the rest of us. However, the crises of recent years have highlighted just how much it can affect our everyday lives – and therefore, the need to know about it and understand it. For this reason, I was delighted to be given the opportunity to provide an impartial link between this world and young people in London. Knowledge is power as they say! And our aim is to do what we can to support and empower young people to have the confidence to make successes of their lives and contribute positively to our City.