We’ve also had a number of enquiries regarding our collections, ranging from a request for information on fish bone samples from archaeological sites, to questions about plans and standing building drawings of a church in the City of London which we hold in our collection. While these are standard enquiries for a collection like LAARC, they do sometimes involve the investigation of our legacy data to find out exactly what information is available.

So, what exactly is legacy data I hear you ask? Well, in the context of digital preservation it is often used to refer to files or data stored in old or potentially obsolete formats, which as a result can be difficult to access and even harder to interpret. As a result, and in particular when dealing with enquiries relating to archaeological excavations which occurred in the 1980’s and early 1990’s (when digital records were being created, but the idea of digital preservation hadn’t really entered our consciousness), it is sometimes necessary to conduct searches across this legacy data, extrapolate the required information, and manipulate and migrate the data into a more accessible format, while ensuring that the data itself has not been altered in the process.

Part of our legacy toolkit at LAARC!

Our standards and guidance for deposition, and our work with current depositors of archaeological records, aims to ensure that we are not faced with these problems for current and future digital deposits. However, for digital records that were created before such standards were in place, we simply have to deal with the data in whatever form we have it, and work to the best of our abilities to extract the required information. Our long term goal is to process and migrate all of the legacy data we currently hold into accessible formats which we can then provide access to online, but with legacy data from over 670 sites, it will take some time!!

I was lucky enough to get an opportunity to talk about some of these issues when I was invited to give a short presentation at the Digital Preservation: What I Wish I Knew Before I Started event, organised and co-hosted by the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and the Archives and Records Association (ARA) back in January. The event aimed to give ideas and practical advice concerning digital preservation to current archive and records management students, and hopefully inspire them to get involved in this particular area. For anyone interested, all the presentations from the day are available at the DPC event page and comments from the day can be found on Twitter by searching the hashtag #dpc_wiwik.

Finally, I can’t write a blog about my work at LAARC without mentioning that it’s our 10th anniversary this year – and we are running a number of events and hands on activities both at LAARC and the Museum of London to celebrate. I had my first experience of these when I participated in the Archaeology Up Close day on the 20th January, when we put on a display of finds and records on the theme of ‘Made in London’. Various finds were on show which provided evidence for shoe making in the Roman period, medieval glass and ceramic making, and post medieval clay tobacco pipe manufacturing. It was great to be able to share our collections, and passion for archaeology, with visitors to the museum, and for my part it was certainly nice to get away from my computer for a day! Various LAARC staff will be at the Museum every Monday, Tuesday and Friday for the next 8 weeks, talking about our archive collections and archaeology in general, so come and say hello when you are on your next visit, and follow the LAARC VIP blog for more info.

LAARC staff talking to (hopefully) interested members of the public about archaeology

In the run up to our Pleasure Garden Ball event at the Museum of London on Tuesday 14 February, we’ve put together a quick blog post that should tell you everything you need to know about the pleasure garden!

As London became more built up in the 17th and 18th centuries, Londoners began to need open spaces to relax in. Pleasure gardens were built at the edge of the city and were privately run. The most famous were the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens.

Vauxhall, 1785 by Thomas Rowlandson

Pleasure gardens competed for visitors, vying with each other to offer evermore exciting entertainments. Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens offered a wide variety of entertainment, including lion-tamers, trampoline clowns, fortune tellers, ventriloquists, monkeys, dogs, jugglers, horses who danced to a waltz and fire walkers.

Tournaire's Equestrians, Vauxhall Gardens, 1846

Costumes from the Museum of London’s pleasure gardens

The Museum of London’s pleasure gardens

The Museum’s Roman collection boasts some very fine examples of bronze, silver and gold coinage, and traces the history of Rome from the Republic, through the rise and eventual decline of the Empire, and culminates in the ascendancy of Byzantium.

The collection spans a period of no-less than seven centuries and represents over 100 different emperors, empresses, princes, rebels and usurpers.

The biggest challenge in working with this collection stems from the sheer volume of coin designs that the emperors could produce.

Recently I have been working with the coins of Emperor Domitian (81-96AD). Domitian alone was responsible for producing over 400 different coin designs during his 15 year reign. This is obviously a huge amount, but such numbers are not uncommon, and indeed such an output is dwarfed by that of others, such as Hadrian, who introduced nearly 1100 different coin designs during his rule, 117-138AD.

It may initially seem surprising that the emperors put so much thought into their coinage.

However, in a period before mass media, coins offered the perfect opportunity for the emperors to ‘meet’ their public. The minting of coins was the greatest source of propaganda available to the emperors.

They range of designs is astonishing. Coins were issued to commemorate great military victories, grand building projects, the quelling of rebellions and to celebrate the might and history of Rome.

They also gave ample opportunity for the emperors to associate themselves and their rule with a particular god, goddess or virtue by depicting them on the reverse.

In this respect the coins offer a real window into the ideology, principles and concerns of the emperors themselves. They could choose to depict themselves as philosophers, facilitators of peace and prosperity, or conversely, they could adopt a very different stance and associate themselves with Mars, the god of war, showing that they were prepared to hold onto their power with an iron fist if circumstances required it.

With such a vast array of coins being minted, correct identification offers a significant challenge.

Fortunately much of the collection is very well preserved. Some of the coins appear as if struck yesterday, and are identified and read as easily as they would have been millennia ago. However, time has taken its toll on many others.

The portraits are worn and reverses corroded, inscriptions are obliterated and details reduced to little more than a few lumps and bumps. In a few cases, identification is simply impossible. However, more often than not, identification can be made from the slightest of details. Until the fourth century the portraits of the emperors are very distinctive; subsequently, little more than the curve of the nose or the curl of a beard can give away their identity. Similarly the flick of a wing or the angle of an arm can all help identify the figure on the reverse.

I feel incredibly lucky to be able to handle these objects on a daily basis, and think of the many hands they may have passed between in their long history and the day to day transaction they may have been involved in. Yet, they are not simply discs of metal used to buy bread, wine, clothing or even be exchanged for possible brothel tokens! They can give us a real insight into the minds of the emperors themselves and the state and character of the empire.

I hope that when these coins are made available online to the public  in the summer of 2012 you will find them as interesting as I do.

It is hoped that by opening up of this collection online it will not only help the Museum engage with a wider public audience, but also offer a considerable contribution to the understanding of Roman numismatics in London, and provide increased opportunity for further enquiry, study and fresh analysis.

All images copyright Museum of London.

Celebrating the capital’s enthusiasm and affection, ‘At Home with the Queen‘, will feature Londoners photographed in their own homes with their cherished souvenirs of Queen Elizabeth II.

Here, exhibition curator, Julia Hoffbrand, updates us on the search for people and souvenirs to feature:

“Right. Just back from a very extended Christmas and New Year break. Mince pies and lie-ins behind me, I sit down, coffee in hand, to look at my inbox. Lots of enquiries, some general briefings for the Museum’s collections online resource, and some stray spam asking if I want strange things I’ve never heard of. And then on to the ‘At Home with the Queen’ inbox and post pigeon-hole.

Hurrah! Several new submissions have arrived whilst I’ve been away. They’re great! I print them out and put them with all the others received so far to review after the closing date for submissions on 31 January.

The exhibition’s beginning to look good.

I’m really pleased and excited by the range of Londoners who’ve sent in photos of themselves so far – a real mix of ages and backgrounds, some quite unexpected. Older people who remember the Coronation, people in their 20s and 30s who’ve inherited their grandparents’ commemoratives, and kids with books about the Queen which their parents read aloud to them before bed.

It’s fun working on an exhibition where Londoners themselves provide the content – you have no idea what’s going to arrive next and, barring the obscene and offensive, anything goes in this exhibition. It’s what Londoners make it – my role is to bring everything together and with the exhibition team create a display people want to visit and enjoy.

I’ve been really encouraged by the positive reactions I’ve had from people whenever I mention ‘At Home with the Queen’.  A brief chat at my local fish and chip shop where I put up a poster reveals that the owner once met the Queen when he was a kid and will hunt out his photo for the exhibition. A conversation at the library (and another poster later) uncovers a woman who has two Golden Jubilee shot glasses bought she says, at a petrol station on the way to Devon in 2002 (she says it’s a long story ….).

The next step for me is to start writing the design brief for ‘At Home with the Queen’. This outlines the exhibition’s content, structure and ‘feel’ for the designer to work from. After this, I’ll revisit our stores to choose a small selection of the Museum’s commemorative objects to display alongside Londoners’ photographs (I have had a quick look already and had these by my desk):

We’re hoping to also display some of the objects that appear in people’s photographs so I’ll need to speak to our design department to find out what display cases we can use …

As this years’ intern within the applied arts section of the conservation department at the Museum of London I am very grateful to have been given the exciting opportunity of experiencing the build-up and installation of the Museum’s major new exhibition – Dickens and London.

In the months before installation began, conservators were busy ensuring all the objects and artefacts were suited to being placed on display. Within the new exhibition objects of a range of materials are installed including shop signs from Dickensian London, documents written in Dickens’ own hand and furniture from Dickens’ house.

This required the knowledge and expertise of our whole conservation team, particularly specialists in paper, textiles and the applied arts.

Within the Applied Arts section we work to conserve many artefacts of Victorian social history; however, as an admirer of Dickens it has been incredibly rewarding being able to work on objects with a particularly close connection to the man himself – such as this chair he was often photographed in.

Dickens’ chair is on open display within the new exhibition, so work was required to stabilise and secure the aged leather upholstery, predominantly around the back rest, where the degraded material had begun to laminate and fall away.

In addition to this, surface cleaning was conducted to remove dust.

Modern ethics within the field of conservation maintain that minimal intervention should be practiced when conserving artefacts – this means altering the original material and structure as little as possible, whilst ensuring the object is sturdy enough to be displayed or stored. We also aim to make every process and alteration reversible, so our changes could be ‘undone’ if needed in the future. For Dickens’ chair this meant adhering loose leather with a removable adhesive to consolidate the fragile material.

Historic leather can suffer acidic degradation due to reactions with sulphurous pollutants in the air. Testing the pH of the leather of Dickens’ chair revealed the leather had become particularly acidic – it was therefore thought appropriate to treat the leather with an aluminium compound – a process that effectively re-tans the leather – neutralising acidity and reversing some degradation processes.

Preventive conservation is also a key role of the museum’s conservators and collection care staff. With regards to this we have been carefully monitoring light levels (particularly important where objects such as Dickens’ handwritten manuscripts are displayed!), ensuring the environment within the gallery is suitable for the collections and that the cases are dust free – the latter involving several days spent cleaning the inside and outside of display cases!

It has been brilliant to see the culmination of many people’s knowledge, ideas and skills work together to create such an exciting and enchanting exhibition.

You can hear more about the conservation work at the Museum’s next free ‘meet the expert’ event at 2pm on Wednesday 25 January.

Either search “Theatrical tinsel portraits” to browse the collection or you can access them directly using this link.

Here our Project Assistant, Ellie, provides her perspective on some of the prints she has recently been working with:

During the nineteenth century, London’s theatres were a popular medium. Whole genres of popular plays would develop and protests were carried out when theatre prices rose. Theatre-goers could buy prints of actors playing various roles and soon tinsel prints also became available. Many of the plays included spectacular combat and dramatic sequences, and by adorning prints with paint, fabric and metal foil, theatregoers could convey some of the spectacle of the stage.

One of the collections the museum is putting online is its collection of theatrical tinsel prints. These have been carefully photographed and their museum database records updated. The prints could be intricately detailed, which suggests that they were made by adults. The majority of subjects of tinsel prints are male actors, and a high proportion of these are depicted in combat. Figures in chain mail and armour offered ample potential for the keen tinseller, as the metallic elements of their costumes invited tinsel adornment.

They could use metal foil and fabric, such as these velvet ‘monstrous beasts’. Often tinsel prints depict spectacular moments of drama within a performance. The earlier ones give information about roles, performances and actors. Later on the activity of tinselling became an established pastime and the information about specific performances is printed infrequently.

Most of the items in the museum’s collection come from Jonathan King, who ran a stationary shop in Essex road, Islington. His collection of tinsel prints was especially illustrative, as it gave an account not only of the material cultures of enthusiasm, popular craft and souvenir collecting, but because the prints themselves also include a printed record of London’s theatre during the middle of the nineteenth century. The collection is also significant because it includes items relating to the production of tinsel materials.

This illustration shows how sample sheets were used to decide which colour adornments would be used. The way the imaged is repeated reminds me of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn series (external link).  The repetition of shapes and colours pre-empts the ways that Warhol’s colourful, printed images would later depict the actress as iconic.

The museum’s collection includes a number of actresses, such as this print, which have been adorned. Women feature less often in tinsel prints, perhaps because their costumes didn’t offer as much scope for the tinsel-mad enthusiast. Writers have also speculated that the scarcity of actresses suggests that tinselling was an activity for young boys, who were more interested in dramatic and heroic scenes.

The collection also includes some of the printing plates used to make the penny prints and this one also shows Mrs Daly as Poll Maggot.

Initially tinsel pieces were sold to match the prints, and this stock sheet shows how they were fastened and bundled in packages.

 Dies like these would be used to cut out individual pieces. This bow stamp is from the collection, and looking along the side of the stamp you can see evidence of how hard it must have been struck to shape the metal foil pieces.

The museum’s collection of the tools for tinsel production is very rare. Collections online makes it possible to see the stamps, the tinsel pieces made from them and then to find the pieces on the finished tinsel print.

You can read Ellie’s first blog post on her work here.

Anyway, as part of my training, I’ve been let loose on the LAARC blog, possibly just to see if I can use a computer (so far so good), but also to say a little bit more about LAARC and the role of Archaeological Records (Digital) Officer.

An archaeological archive differs from a traditional archive as it includes both records (in various forms and formats: paper, photographic, digital) and finds. At the LAARC, we accept archives relating to archaeological projects undertaken in the Greater London area, and I will be responsible for managing the digital records that are received as part of these archives.

Archaeology (old stuff) and digital (new stuff) seem odd bed-fellows, but in reality modern archaeological excavations can generate huge amounts of digital data. These can include relatively common digital records such as reports, spreadsheets and digital photographs, to more specialised formats such as GIS (Geographical Information Systems), Geophysics and CAD files.

As well as managing and providing access to these records, I will also be involved in assigning site or ‘project’ codes to new archaeological projects in London, assisting in responding to external enquiries about our collection, keeping our website and collection databases up-to-date, blogging about our work, and helping with the LAARC’s outreach activities.

However, my very next task is to help decorate the traditional LAARC Christmas gingerbread house – an Archaeological Records (Digital) Officer’s work is never done!

Previous incarnation of the traditional LAARC Christmas gingerbread house

Trade tokens were issued between 1648 and 1673 at a time when there was little low denomination coinage being issued by the crown.

As a result traders and business proprietors began issuing tokens as an alternate coinage with equivalent denominations of usually of a farthing, half penny or penny.

On rare occasions higher denominations were issued, in the collection we have two-penny tokens and a sixpence.

On the token could be represented a variety of things including, the issuers name, business (written or depicted as a sign- buildings didn’t have numbers, so signs were used to recognise them), and the date of issue.

Tokens would be accepted by other businesses in the area which would be collected and then exchanged for the equivalent silver coinage from the issuer.

Part of the process of getting the collections online included having all the trade tokens scanned. We were lucky enough to have an excellent team of volunteers that scanned the trade tokens, as well as weighing and measuring them. This has allowed us to gather and display a lot more information about them than we otherwise would.

It left me free to update the records, which involved using existing catalogues, as well as re-examining the tokens to check inscriptions and signs to provide the correct information about a token; it also gave me the time to do some additional research into issuers and the places of issue which provided some fascinating contextual information.

The location of issue for the tokens has involved some interesting research using a variety of sources; mainly the changing names of streets and areas around London over the past few hundred years. Whilst many street names have remained for centuries, some have changed to reflect the changing trades and ownership apparent in some areas. These need to be researched to allow us to place the location of issue of a token as accurately as possible.

We’ve already got a small amount of trade tokens online, in The Great Fire of London 1666 collection. The first batch of trade tokens I have been working on should be online soon and I will be getting the rest of the 4,000 ready to go online next year.

In the meantime I’ll be working on Roman samian ware, so look out for my next blog post about the variety of artwork on Roman samian.

In truth, I find Dickens a difficult read, although I’m a voracious reader of maximalist fiction and devoted to fictional London, which informs my immigrant experience of the city almost as much as my daily life. But I had to force myself through this short novel (I highly recommend Dan Simmons’ ‘Drood’- his fictionalisation vision of events that could have inspired the writing of the book as Dickens and his friend, author Wilkie Collins, confound each other in nightly escapades and attempt to identify the mysterious Drood, who us far more menacing than the innocent victim in Dickens’ story).

Reader, I was only truly interested in two characters, those whose relationship seemed to have tension and spark, namely Edwin and Rosa, betrothed at the behest and bequests of their respective deceased fathers.

I wanted so much to like the entire book, but only Rosa’s character really drew me in, with her passionate energy and desire to be honest in her emotional dealings.

Did Dickens do this on purpose? Discuss…

True to his serialist origins, the central mystery of Edwin’s disappearance (although to me the real mystery is what Jasper is up to and why his opium supplier shows up in Cloisterham) doesn’t occur until over half way through the book, which I think might drag even if it wasn’t unfinished, although the undercurrent of menace that Jasper exudes kept me hanging on.

As we know, Dickens died before completing the book, so perhaps it all would have made more sense had he finished the novel.

You can read Sarah’s blog post as she began her reading of The Mystery of Edwin Drood here.

Dickens and London, a new exhibition from the Museum of London opens 9 December.

Starting to look at art

During this week’s Many East End session, we asked members of youth organisation Tolerance in Diversity what they thought was the most significant event in the East End in the last two years. I’ll reveal their answer in a bit, but first a little about the session. (As we were starting to examine, and create, art this week, you’ll see the photos have taken on a post-modern feel).

Selecting photos

Artist Sarah Carne started off by asking everyone about the photos they had taken in the galleries last week to represent their favourite East End place, person, image and thing. Collectively, the group discussed each photo and sorted them into three categories: Definitely representative, Definitely not representative and Not sure. Strong strands started to emerge amongst the images, the strongest of which was family. Others included Canary Wharf, The Thames, water more generally and modern architecture. One participant had chosen ‘Turkoman’ to represent her favourite East End person, her brother. She said Turkoman reminded her of him when he was little dressing up in girls clothes and in her words, ‘being a girl’.

Turkoman

The ‘Definitely representative ‘ and ‘Not Sure’ photos were then gathered and saved, and participants will be adding them to their project portfolios.

Sarah then introduced us to her art.

Sarah Carne - Loving her Yugo

Sarah explained that she  does a lot of work in film and photography and that, in her words, ‘My art is all about me’. As well as showing us interesting commissions she has done on a variety of topics she also introduced us to what it would appear is the love of her life – her Yugo. The amazing Yugo has been photographed, written upon, Letrasetted (if that’s a word), converted into a cinema, use to ferry people between exhibitions, travelled ‘home’ to Yugoslavia, rotted, molded, broken down and vandalised. And now Sarah is  writing a musical about it. The Yugo is Sarah’s. As art, it represents her and reflects her. The Yugo also provided the subject matter for a series of photos, which when shown in quick succession, convert into a mini film. The combination of self, and the creation of film, was our inspiration for our next task.

Personalising a peg

Sarah gave everyone a peg and asked them to customise it to represent them. One person simply added their name using Letraset, followed by a semi-colon to represent the fact that he does a lot of computer programming. (The semi-colon occurs alot in computer programming, we were told!) Other pegs were converted into a girl with little pigtails and a shark. Others were covered in letters and stickers and one was not touched in itself, but attached to a Bangladeshi flag, to represent nationality.

Loving the peg

So, you may be wondering how all this relates to most significant event in the East End in the last two years. Well…

Sarah explained that the customised pegs, and other pegs if necessary were going to be ’brought to life’ in a quick film to represent that event, whatever the group thought it may be. So, a discussion began on possible contenders for this event. Suggestions included:

1. Construction of the Olympics site
2. Losing the bid to host the World Cup
3. English Defensive League march this summer
4. Construction of Westfield
5. Riots in Hackney

After some to-ing and fro-ing the group came to a consensus that, in their opinion, the most significant event in terms of impact on their East End was the English Defensive League march. Several of the group members had been there on the day, having joined lots of people in coming out against the march. In the midst of the tension, the EDL coach broke down, just outside the East London Mosque, and a previously unpredicted flash point erupted.  You can read more about the event here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-14779772

So, using pegs, and a healthy slug of creativity, the group created a short film of the events of the day. We do have the film footage but haven’t had a chance to do anything post production yet so a photo will have to do!

Us and Them - In Pegs

And that concluded last night’s session. I’m sure we will be going back to this topic, and looking in further depth at why the group felt that this is the most significant East End event in the last two years. Because of the public sector strike we are not meeting next week, so the group are meeting independently. Leading on from examining what their East End is, they are going to be considering how they would represent it artistically. Their ‘pitch’ is going to be presented to the curator of View Tube in Stratford on 7th December. Watch this space…

Our collection of business cards, invoices, brochures and receipts, provides a snapshot of London’s working life.

The collection will be made available online for the first time next Spring, giving researchers the chance to access the objects from the comfort of their own homes.

I imagine this resource will be well-used by family historians as well as academic researchers, who will be able to search the online information for specific names and trades.

Each of the cards and receipts will have a photograph to accompany the printed information, allowing anyone to virtually delve into the boxes.

As well as showing the aesthetic development of professional branding, the cards illuminate some canny combinations of careers.

I was surprised to find one prudent gentleman whose card advertised his work as both Carpenter and Undertaker.  I have since learned this was a common combination of careers and presumably provided a relatively stable source of income.

The museum’s collection of Valentine’s cards is the largest of the three collections I am working with.

The collection contains almost 1800 Valentines cards, the oldest of which are early nineteenth century, and predate the uniform penny postal service introduced in the 1840s.

The majority of the cards were hand made by workers employed by the stationer Jonathan King from premises in Essex Road, Islington.

The collection includes a number of experimental cards and although there is a great deal of Victorian sentimentality, some of the more unusual cards include those with comic or insulting messages and several featuring photographs of cats.

Whilst some motifs have remained in today’s commercial Valentines cards, it is not difficult to see why cards featuring the ‘Lobster in Love’ did not take off.

Similarly, it is some relief that cards with stuffed birds attached no longer grace the shelves of high-street stationers. I will blog in more detail about the Valentine’s cards in February when the collection goes online.

You can catch up on all our collections online blog posts to date here.

This is a photograph of part of one of the museum’s stores.

Inside these boxes the museum has a remarkable collection of printed ephemera, which is often described as the minor, transient documents of everyday life.

The collection includes things like tickets, posters, flyers and greetings cards: the kind of material which holds lots of information about everyday life but is often thrown away.

My job as collections online project assistant is to work to get some of this material available online.

My blog posts will introduce the collections I am working with to give an idea about some of the fascinating collections that will be accessible through collections online in the coming year.

Recently I have been working on our collection of embellished theatrical portraits.

These images, known as tinsel prints, depict actors in popular roles. They were sold plain and uncoloured, often for a penny each, with metal foil adornments which would be used to decorate the prints.

The museum’s tinsel print collection is extensive and includes completed prints, unfinished pieces, tinsel ornaments and the punches used to stamp out the ornaments.

The tinsel prints will provide an insight into the history of theatre, into theatrical costume and scenery and props as well as the hobbies and souvenir collecting of nineteenth-century Londoners.

They also provide a resource for researchers interested in individual actors and a later blog will elaborate on one actor in particular.

The Tinsel prints should go online during December and I will blog about them in more detail at that time.

I will also update you shortly with a blog post on my work with our collection of trade and valentine cards.

Until then the team would love to hear from you with your thoughts on exploring the 10,000 plus objects currently available from our collections online.

You can catch up on all our collections online blog  posts to date here.

I love a good mystery but balked at the normal bulk of a Dickens’ tome, so surely The Mystery of Edwin Drood was for me.

It opens as a classic potboiler in its lurid depiction of an opium den in Victorian London’s East End.

Fascinating to both his readers of the time and countless others afterwards, he invites us to spy through Drood’s uncle John Jasper’s eyes, safe in the knowledge that this exotic depravity can’t touch us. But Jasper next fetches up in placid rural Cloisterham…

The opening chapter of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, classic in the Orientalism of the time, immediately made me uncomfortable.

The racist depiction of anonymous (and in real life almost certainly blameless) Chinese sits uncomfortably with our contemporary sensibilities and our acknowledgement of the rich cultural history of this city.

If this is Dicken’s London, then I prefer the stifled, cosy twin ‘cloister’ of Furvinall’s Inn, which puts us squarely in the precints of Holborn, in environs we can almost recreate during late night walks today.

The Inns of London provide some of the most magical, evocative landscapes, windows into the recent past, although Dickens may not have meant his readers to romanticise them.

I will be continuing my thoughts as we progress through the book via regular book club posts on Twitter and Facebook  (why not join us?) and will round up my final thoughts back here on the blog once we have completed our journey through the mystery of Edwin Drood.

Dickens and London, a major new exhibition at the Museum of London, opens 9 December 2011.

Families visiting the Museum of London Docklands worked with artist Sophie Buxton to make the hull, rigging, masts and sails.

We made the ship in sections and joined these together.

We added people, livestock, treasure and all the other things you would find on board.

Here is the pirate ship finished – many thanks to all those who helped to build this wonderful vessel!

If you would like to join us from festive fun in December you will find event details on our website here.

Many of these were taken by photo journalist Henry Grant, a freelance photographer who had started out working for a news agency on Fleet Street. He was known for his skill at capturing spontaneous ‘moments’ within ordinary life, resulting in some great pictures giving us a fantastic vision of London in this period.

As well as photographs of favourite London sights such as the pigeons in Trafalgar Square or a ship sailing through Tower Bridge, there are also photographs of people shopping in markets and department stores, children playing in parks and adventure playgrounds, students at training colleges, the funfair on Hampstead Heath, patients at health clinics and protestors attending demonstrations against the H bomb, the Colour Bar Immigration Bill and Rent increases.

We are working to get a total of 1,000 of these photographs online by August next year (you should be able to see the first of these online by February 2012), adding to the selection already on our Collections online.

There are over 80,000 photographs in Grant’s archive and so the first job is to select the images we want from the hundreds of contacts sheets. This can be very time consuming but the biggest problem is the careful selection – we could include so many more!

The next step is to prepare the actual negatives for digitisation.

The negatives are all 6×6 or 35mm and the strips usually require cutting down, which means using a light box to check that you have the correct image and to ensure that no damage is done to the negative itself.

Using the lightbox means there’s no Seasonal Affective Disorder for me! The negatives are then sleeved and numbered and will all be photographed this December by our in house team. I will be researching the images and writing captions until August 2012.

Negatives that I’ve worked on this week were a varied bunch and included Ton Up boys (early Rockers) and their motorbikes outside the Ace Café, young children at the Robin Hill Day nursery in Notting Hill and Londoners on a daytrip to Brighton (my favourites are an elderly lady in her furs on the seafront and a couple sunbathing fully clothed and fast asleep in their deckchairs!).

Our Collections online resource currently allows access to over 10,000 objects from the Museum’s collections, available through a single point of access. Click here to begin exploring!

Meet our Project Assistants who are coordinating the documentation and digitisation of our objects for Collections online in the first of our blog posts here.

With half term approaching we are heading for the last two performances for a while, as our pirate will be taking a well deserved winter rest.

Come on down and catch him while you can. Also on offer are stories, scientific investigations of maps, making hats, treasure and building a ship from scratch.

Our website has a list of all the free half term activities for families here and don’t forget that our special exhibition Pirates: The Captain Kidd Story closes on the 30 October!

The Museum now has ambitious plans for making greater online access to its collections over the next three years, including the addition over 90,000 more objects.

To achieve this aim the Museum has recently taken on four Project Assistants to coordinate the documentation and digitisation necessary to achieve this target.

Working closely with curators and to a strict data standard, they will be upgrading records in our collections management database and either scanning the objects themselves or liaising with photographers to create new digital images.

The four Project Assistants, and their current areas of focus, are:

Anna: Photographs by Henry Grant

Verity: 17th century trade tokens and Roman Samian ware

Ed: Roman coins

Ellie: Trade cards, Valentine cards and Tinsel prints

Records will be released in batches throughout the year and during this time the Project Assistants will be keeping you up to date with their work via blog posts discussing the objects they are digitising and the techniques used to put them online.

So check back soon for the first of our posts starting with updates from Anna and Ellie in the coming weeks.

We felt that the support that resulted in our diligently boxed PLA Archive volumes deserved to be highlighted in a post of its own.

Here, one of our volunteers, Kate, shares her thoughts on her time with us and the process of boxing up key PLA record books:

“It was a fantastic experience and very valuable as a trainee paper conservator to be able to have ‘hands-on’ experience of cleaning and repairing documents then building the archive boxes for long-term storage for an established museum.

I would measure the books and make each box to fit the book, making sure there was enough room around the edges inside the box to be able to fit fingers in to lift the text out. To stop the book sliding around plastazote can be slotted into the box.

Using archival adhesive I would fold the archival cardboard and stick at the edges together using clamps to hold everything in place while the glue was drying. The box was made in two parts, a base and a lid that fitted over the base.

Here is an image of a bespoke box ready to go back to the store! ”

Look out also for an update soon from Claire Frankland, Port & River Archivist and Project Manager, as this project reaches its first birthday.

Recently our Learning Project Manager Isabel was approached by a group of 15 visually impaired prospective visitors, who along with their helpers, were interested in coming along to the Museum of London.

Add-Learning group in their second day following a tour of our Medieval gallery

With Isabel’s help, hosts Daniela, Arna and Ed created a bespoke object handling session using original artefacts tailored to the groups needs.

The group consisted of retired adults from various backgrounds, all very knowledgeable about British history, who once a year arrange a visit to a different city, and visit a particular museum.

This year, they arranged a visit to London and naturally, they chose the Museum of London to brush up on their knowledge of the capital.

The group requested three tours and three object handling sessions in our Roman, Medieval and War, Plague and Fire galleries.

A visitor feeling a small head of a saint from a Medieval monastery

For the Great Fire of London day they had a real brick to touch from Pudding Lane (dug from the excavation of 1979), a medieval bowling ball, and a bell from a post you would tie your horse to whenever you rode to London.

Arna also showed a money box which was used in London’s theatres dating from the 17th century and a toy gun that could apparently fire for real – and hurt people in those times.

Money boxes were used in 17th century theatres as we know that spectators would regularly watch one act and then decide to remain or leave; if they stayed they had to pay a fee. In the audience there were a lot of people carrying such money boxes in order to collect the cash from them. Once filled up these ‘assistants’ would then take the boxes to the office to count what collected. That’s why we still call it the ‘box office’.

Arna shows a round wooden piece, one of the mystery objects used during the handling session

I was present in the galleries during the tours as well as in our Clore Learning Centre for the object handling sessions and was not surprised to have received an excellent report from hosts and visitors alike. Ed told me that the whole experience was fun and interesting and the feedback from the group universally positive. Even the three lovely guide dogs seemed to have enjoyed it!

Ed answering challening questions on Roman artefacts

The part that they all enjoyed most were the handling sessions because it’s an experience that really allows you examine objects used and held many years ago and to connect with the past.

We have been trained to deliver tours to visually impaired visitors and we offer free daily VocalEyes tours whenever they are requested. This experience however is entirely different. Daniela, for example, learnt a new tour for the occasion and I am sure they gained some good knowledge of how to lead such groups around the Museum in future.

Daniela presents a 11th century horseshoe. Horses at that time were very small, this shoe would fit a modern pony!

In collaboration with our Learning Department we are now considering developing the experience further so that it can be offered to other adult groups and children.

Visit our web page to find out more about our facilities for visitors with impairments.

I will write a new post soon on something absolutely special happening in November.

Keep reading my blog. Ciao!

Giusy

October’s Dickens Book Club has already kicked off in my household, descending as I have into Dickens’ murky world of the year one thousand seven hundred and seventy five in A Tale of Two Cities.

Despite having studied English Literature at university my Dickens readometer is a little stunted (blame the tutors). Great Expectations (favourite all-time novel) and Oliver Twist (precious few show tunes) are the only two books I have made it to the end of. Even my dad’s fervent enthusiasm couldn’t see me to the end of The Pickwick Papers while the sheer length of Bleak House seemed overwhelming to the point of being unreadable.

But I’m ready to start anew. I’m already excited about peering through the thick mist that envelops so many of Dickens’ novels to unearth the maze of characters beneath; to find new favourite phrases from Dickens’ witticisms (the indignant ‘I’ll eat my head!’ a particular favourite from Great Expectations); and to discover the moments that will stay with me long after the book is done, just like those between Pip and Joe – what larks!

At forty six chapters long I am being pragmatic about the challenge that lays before us. My plan is to read two chapters per day for the first fifteen days of October, then one chapter per day until the end of the month. If my maths is correct this should see us glide neatly towards the final chapters in time for Halloween and November’s book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

So I’ll be captaining our speedy ship through the 400 plus pages of Dickens’ fourteenth novel via updates on Facebook and Twitter – please do share your thoughts, comments, favourite quotes and anything else you’d like to discuss on those pages.

Finally, don’t forget you can buy your copy of A Tale of Two Cities from Foyles Bookshop and receive a discount when using the code ‘MOLBC’.

The Your 2012 exhibition is up and running and we are getting some fantastic feedback. If you have not already seen it then come along to the Museum of London Docklands and visit our free exhibition detailing the changes that have been going on around the Olympic site at Stratford.

So much has been happening recently that I felt obliged to give you this bumper blog update detailing the big changes. To begin, there is now a large bridge that is going over Stratford High Street so that users of the Greenway do not need to cross the road.

Health and Safety during the construction of the bridge has been a priority as can be seen from the below:

Further construction is also continuing on the Orbit. It is now over 76 metres high.

The Greenway beside the stadium has also been busy with its own art installation that you can see below:

If you were wondering what the explanation for this artwork is then read below:

If you would like to find out more about the Olympic site then I recommend that you come along to one of our Olympic walking tours,  ‘Walk the Olympic Way: Stratford Regeneration Tour’ which happen every Saturday and the last Wednesday of each month.

In case you are wondering what the tours are like, here are some photos from last week’s tour with our ever-enthusiastic resident Stratford and Olympic expert, Dave.

Finally, a reminder that we are looking for your photographs and observations of the Olympic Park to share on our YOUR 2012 flickr group. We will also be sharing in this group some of the hundreds of images that we took while developing this display.

In this post I focus on the workshops developed by my colleagues Stephanie and Joanna.

Stephanie has run a Victorian object handling workshop which has looked specifically at objects found in the kitchen and to do with food and drink, for example butter pats and toast forks.

During the session she used pictures to illustrate how kitchens have changed over the time and she loved to talk about different technologies and appliances that you find in the kitchen. For the kids to take home, she has offered some examples of Victorian Recipes to try.
She has enjoyed a lot doing this workshop, because it allowed children to actually handle real Victorian objects. One of her tricks was not to tell the kids what the objects were so to make them guess. It was nice I am sure to see their expressions when discovering what the objects were used for, for example when it came to a very unusual bottle opener.

She also enjoyed doing the workshop, because the Victorian period is one of her favourite periods in British history and she definitely loves cooking! I can testify to this as the great quantity of cupcakes frequently baked for the Hosts team made their way to the staff room straight from her kitchen oven!

Joanna’s workshop is called “The Glassmaker Apprentice” and focuses on families with children aged 3+. Her workshop is based on the long and fascinating history of stained glass work pieces, with a particular focus on windows.

She told me that the very first examples are from ancient Egypt, later Greece and Rome, but its most height of fashion was during the dark medieval times.
Nowadays this fashion is coming back usually in smaller forms like elements in doors or art works in public buildings, galleries, churches and very tiny forms like window decorations and sun catchers.
On the workshop day Joanna and the families work at making sun catchers.

There are several shapes to choose from and they use brightly foils to imitate glass. To begin with, children and parents are encouraged to draw a flower or other designs on a black cardboard and then they cut off all the holes. For younger children Johanna offers already made models. The following and easy step is to glue various pieces of coloured foils to the back side of the sun catcher and finally attach a string so to be hung in a window. Have a look, I love the dove one!

You can join Johanna’s  next  workshop on Sunday 13 November.  I hope to see you there!

Now naturally many of you are aware that the largest shopping mall in Europe is opening today in Stratford. As these exclusive photos show the whole place is extremely busy and it is only its opening day!

If you would like to find out more about the Olympic site then I recommend you come along to one of our Olympic walking tours at  ‘Walk the Olympic Way: Stratford Regeneration Tour’  that are happening every Saturday and last Wednesday of each month.

Also I would like to give a quick reminder that we are looking for your photographs and observations of the Olympic Park to share on our YOUR 2012 flickr group. We will also be sharing in this group some of the hundreds of images that we took while developing this display.