Inside the Museum of London

Hello everyone, Giusy here again from the Museum’s Visitor Services Team. I hope you read and enjoyed my last post on Ed’s mail making. You are still on time to catch up here if you haven’t!

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!

Hello, Giusy here again from the Museum’s Visitor Services Team, with more on the workshops you can enjoy developed and run by your hosts (hope you enjoyed my last update on my own Roman mosiac workshops which you can read here).

My colleague Ed has a true mania for mail making. He has always been fascinated and he has been doing it for nearly five years now. If you walk to the galleries you will never find him without a small piece in his hands. I am not joking.

He wrote a dissertation on the topic and discovered that despite the fact mail was used for nearly two thousand years, very little work has been done on it. As an archaeologist it is his belief that the best way to understand an ancient technology is to have a go at making or using it. So now he runs the workshop at the Museum of London demonstrating to the public how mail was made and sharing the secrets that are locked within it.

He told me that in the past weapons and armour were not viewed the way they are now, they were integral to society, they had magical powers, names and were status symbols.
Mail armour was one of the most expensive armours around; it is very labour intensive, taking him around 7 months to make a complete shirt alone. It involves linking each ring through four others, and if made properly, riveting them shut to prevent them opening. In a complete mail shirt there can be as many as 28,000 rings, each one formed and riveted by hand.

His research into mail and its manufacture has brought to light a number of interesting new facts: such as how was mail made to fit the wearer? What sort of quality is the metal that mail is made from? What do these facts then tell us about the people making and wearing mail? When Ed does his workshop the public gets the chance to see and touch complete mail garments as well as have a go at riveting a ring or two.

The hope is that through this the public gain some new understanding of this interesting aspect of history, plus its fun! As the workshops progress visitors will see how the rings they have riveted become part of the weave of a new mail coif, a form of head protection that will be put in one of our gallery prop boxes for future visitors to try on.

Be sure to visit our Medieval Gallery to find out more.

Why not Join Ed for his next workshop this Sunday (7 August)!

During the course of building developments within the museum, some of the conservation boxes with skeletal material in the rotunda store had to be moved from their shelf locations and temporarily stored elsewhere.

Once the building work was complete the boxes could be returned to the store but in turn needed to be located back on to different shelves and the inventory updated.  With the return of the boxes and the gaining of some new space within the store there was an opportunity for a rationalising of the space and re grouping of the boxes from the sites currently curated by the museum. As there are over 17,000 individuals curated that equates to a very substantial number of boxes and a major task.

The moving of the boxes and rationalising of the space within the store needed to take place in July in order to be ready to accept more material from other sites.

The endeavour of moving several hundred boxes to new locations in the store was a task that our curators would need assistance with to be able to complete and achieve the target. Most opportunely help was at hand in the guise of three willing work experience volunteers: Liam, Amelia and Kate.

Jelena Bekvalac, Curator Human Osteology explains more…

We had the pleasure here at the Centre for Human Bioarchaeology during two weeks in July to have three lovely work experience students with us, Liam Bateson, Amelia Stephenson and Kate Marrion. They were all extremely helpful, interested and really ably assisted in our grand task of rationalising the boxed skeletal material in the rotunda, re-labelling boxes and up dating the inventory.

Amelia and Kate although here with us for a shorter time aided in moving material from the lab back to the rotunda, assisted in replacing boxes on to the correct shelves, labelling boxes and listing new locations of the boxes which, are integral to the up keep of the inventory so we know where all the boxes are correctly located.

Liam and Kate were also able to participate in a session about object handling and so saw another aspect and objects in the museum. With the assistance of our plastic cast skeleton Dr W we were able to go through the names of the bones in the skeleton and how they articulate with one another. They all proved to be keen learners and had very good osteological aptitude, young osteologists in the making!

Liam was at the forefront of box moving and relocation being involved for a longer time period. Additionally to moving all of the boxes a record of their new locations had to be listed for the inventory to be updated and new location labels on the boxes. Once again Liam, Amelia and Kate rose to the challenge and diligently labelled the boxes and listed the new locations.  The task took considerable effort, was physically demanding when moving the boxes around and often very dusty. The boxes have now all been relocated, space created and new inventory locations noted, a great accomplishment. This outstanding achievement in the store could not have been reached without the help and hard work of Liam, Amelia and Kate, they were superb.

We try to to accommodate work experience requests when certain suitable tasks such as this reorganisation arise, my best advice if you are interested in helping us is to keep checking the museums website here.

Liam also found the time to write up his thoughts on his work experience for our blog which he shares with you now:

When looking for work experience I did not go out searching for a job in the Museum of London’s Centre for Human bioarchaeology. My specification was simple; something at least vaguely interesting. I tried various jobs; one of these trains of thought was working in a lab. This is the train that lead me into this job.

I had no real presumptions of what exactly it would be like other than the names of the people I would be working with and that there would be skeletons involved. When I told people what I was doing for work experience they stared blankly back at me bewildered. No one I knew prior to the work experience had any idea exactly what was in store for me. Up until now I haven’t actually explained what the department does. It’s simple; it studies human remains from the London area. These are uncovered from archaeological sites mostly from construction sites. The department is host to over 17,000 individuals more than half from one site; Spitalfields (with roughly 10,500 individuals) and so it is a brilliant resource for budding osteologists.

First impressions were good, it was a friendly environment and I was not set menial tasks which could bore me to death (which I have been told happens with lots of work experience). What it has made apparent to me is one, how tiring work is and two, that it is slightly more relaxed than I had previously expected.

For the largest part of my work experience I have been helping rearrange the boxes in the rotunda to create space and a form of organisation. I have also done some work on the human skeleton so I can (slightly unreliably) name all of the bones in the body (saving individual carpals, tarsals, ribs and some bones in the skull). I can now correctly lay out a skeleton and find its gender. And possibly have a rather shaky guess at the age.

Osteology aside, I have picked up some skills in logistics and some invaluable experience in the workplace.  However saying this it has not made much different to my future aims for work (my life plain is still completely indecisive after university).  

And lastly I want to say thank you to everyone who has helped me or let me help them in my work experience, it was a pleasure.

Hi guys Giusy here, back again with our first update of the month from the museums Visitor Services Team.

Here at the Museum of London we love to get inspired by our collections. I hear that very exciting projects are on their way but let me show you what some of us have been working on so far.
We all have a passion for London but for some of the Hosts this enthusiasm becomes a real obsession and so we have been running a different series of workshops for families and children at the museum.

My personal inspiration comes straight from my favourite exhibition in the Museum: the Roman Gallery. With a focus on perhaps one the most famous art activities during Roman times, I decided to work on a mosaic, but a real one, to be made with real stone tesserae and based on authentic Roman design!
The model that I chose for my common project is a twisted rope design technically called Guilloche. I thought it was exceptionally representative of the Roman culture as it was often used in borders to enclose popular patterns and also because we have a wonderful one in our Roman gallery.

What a better example with which to get inspiration from for the kids!
I created the Guilloche freehand but it took me a bit of organisation and time.
I sketched six big circles in an A3 sheet and I drew six smaller circles inside. To make the large circles on the sheets I used a pen held in a loop in a thread and I pinned the string at the centre of the circle to obtain radius of not more than 3cm. At this point I simply drew lines for the rows of the stone tesserae.
Roman craftsmen would opt for different combination of colours according to the uses they were designated for. I wanted to create something that looked quite similar to our Bucklersbury mosaic.

The mosaic I am working on with the kids has six lines and presents an alternation of 3 colours. Normally guilloche frames would have had three lines of tesserae only. These might have been one line of one colour and the remaining two of a different colour but they could also have a combination of three colours for each row.
Here you can see what we have achieved so far…

It is a very time consuming work and your patience will pay dividend.

Our Roman Gallery is planned to be completely refurbished after the 2012 Olympics Games.
I can’t wait to give a tour in the new exhibition and perhaps develop another workshop!

This month’s Continue Creating workshop saw old and new faces alike making 1940s inspired hats. Adult Programmes Manager and freelance milliner, Isabel Benavides showed participants how to take hats bought at charity shops for a couple of pounds and turn them into new creations using ‘make do and mend techniques’. Make do and mend or what has been trendily re-branded as up-cycling, involves taking an old or tired item of clothing, in this instance a hat, and refreshing it into something better. It was popular during rationing when money was tight and often women re-fashioned their husband’s hats, jackets, ties and shirts when they were away fighting for long periods.

 There is some wonderfully kitsch government issued ‘make do and mend’ films from the 1940s on youtube. We watched one that contains the immortal line “You can turn hubby’s hat into a hat for his sweet little wife”. 

http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=51689

We also got a sneak peek at some hats from the store. These included the stunning evening pieces below designed by Italian legend Elsa Schiaparelli.

They then received an introduction to how to sculpt felt, create corsages, manipulate hat wire and use Petersham (specialist hat ribbon).  Everyone really got into it and a range of styles started to emerge. From the naval inspired…

 …through the post-modern…

… to the super exotic…

 By the end a great array of male and female hats had been produced and even a child’s head band as a birthday present for one of the participants’ 7 year old niece. 

 It was good to be reminded of ways to upcycle your wardrobe, using methods from another time of great austerity… 

Yesterday, a group of Londoners roamed around the Museum creating photographs using shoe boxes as cameras. Inspired by images in the Street Photography exhibition, they used the pin-hole technique, pioneered in the 1830s. When working in pin-hole, anything can be your camera. You simply make a hole in a box to let a very small amount of light onto photographic paper. The photographers of the images above and below used shoe boxes.

The shoe boxes were painted black inside, with a sheet of photographic paper on the bottom. The photographers set them up at different points around the site and allowed light through in for about 2 minutes. The images were then developed in the museum dark room with the help of facilitator Kathryn Faulkner and the museum photographic team. The end product is an intriguing negative image, but a few clicks on Photoshop or the right type of phone, reveal the positive version.

This workshop was part of the Inclusion ‘Continue Creating’ programme.

Iron Mongers Hall - Original Negative

Iron Mongers Hall - Positive inversion

Jug and glasses - Original negative

Jug and glasses - Inverted positive

High walk - Original Negative

High walk - Positive inversion

Garden - Negative original

Garden - Positive inversion

Did you know about the particle detector labs hidden deep down in one of London’s “central” tube stations or the famous landmark that was originally built to double up as a site to observe the heavens? Find out with “London Science Uncovered”, the new location based game for London!

The Museum of London Learning Department has teamed up with the Institute of Physics (external link) to take you on a tour of some of London’s famous and lesser known places of scientific discovery. A brand new smartphone game will guide you around the city, giving you activities and photo opportunities along the way.

Take a new view of the city and uncover the fascinating stories behind the places you wander past each day. The trail will take you around central London and will be a great way to fill a lunchtime or a summer’s day.

To enjoy the tour, you will need a smartphone, either an iPhone or Android phone with an internet connection, and the free SCVNGR (external link) app available from iTunes (external link) and the Google App Store (external link). Simply login to the app, choose treks and then search for “London Science Uncovered”.

Once you’ve completed the trail, answered the questions and snapped your photos, come along to the Museum of London. Show your phone and congratulations message to the Museum’s hosts at the entrance desk to claim your goodie bag of prizes!

We’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions too, so send us a message:

aflowers@museumoflondon.org.uk

Blog author: Alex Flowers, Project Coordinator (Digital Learning)

Following a paper presented at the 2009 American Paleopathology (PPA) meeting in Chicago by Jelena Bekvalac, Curator, Centre for Human Bioarchaeology, Museum of London, an opportunity arose to work on a digital x-ray project in the crypt of St Bride’s Church nearby the Museum.

Here, Jelena explains more:

“My paper presentation was based around the analysis of the 227 individuals retained in the crypt of St Bride’s Church, Fleet Street, London.

They are a particularly interesting and unique group of individuals as they have a substantial amount of biographical information associated with them provided by coffin plates and detailed parish records.

This provides a mine of information to assist with further research on the individuals allowing access to numerous documentary data such as birth and marriage certificates, all of which aids greatly in building up a more complete picture of individual lives and the times in which they lived.

I mentioned in my paper that during the analysis of the individuals many disease processes and trauma were discovered, further research of which, would be enhanced with radiographic investigation.

The nature and logistics of the skeletal material and the crypt itself did not make taking the elements off site to be x-rayed a feasible proposition and so the only real option available would be for a portable x-ray machine to be brought into the crypt.

Luckily, one of the people listening to my presentation was Jerry Conlogue from Quinnipiac University, USA, who has had many years experience with radiography and archaeological material, particularly mummified remains.

Jerry was fascinated by the crypt individuals and saw the opportunity for a challenge to be overcome in being able to implement an x-ray project at St Bride’s and he secured funding from the School of Health Sciences at his university to be able to come to London and establish a project with us.

The premise of the project was to ultimately create a digital x-ray archive of the individuals which would be available online from our Centre for Human Bioarchaeology website for research purposes.

So in the summer of 2010, Jerry was able to come to St Bride’s and with the assistance of Dr Mark Viner at Cranfield University and Xograph, hired a portable digital x-ray machine.

The Xograph x-ray system was set up in the crypt and Jerry, with the assistance of student Kelly Eggleton, was able to x-ray all the sub adults (those individuals less than 18 years old) and 70 of the skulls and mandibles. 

We quickly established the speed and efficency of having a digital x-ray machine available providing images of excellent clarity.

The following images are from x-rays taken of a young girl who died aged three years, seven months and nine days in 1840.

Due to the success of the first phase of this project, further funding has been secured from the School of Health Sciences to complete, this year, the x-raying of the remaining  skulls and mandibles.

It is hoped that there will be a continuation of the x-ray project and that the next phase will concentrate on the diseases and trauma identified in the bones.

This will then provide a unique x-ray archive and an invaluable resource for research that will hopefully be readily accessible to researchers via our website.

An added bonus to the nature of this project is that it is non destructive and acts in tandem with the skeletal database as a means of conserving the remains without continual handling of them.”

I’ve been pretty quiet over the last few months on the blog front, but behind the scenes I’ve been working away at lots of different things.  The project I’m most excited about is our Pocket histories and Picturebank project and I can exclusively reveal for the first time (in public anyway) that the products of this are due to launch in March!

I blogged in August (can’t believe it was that long ago!) about the consultation that we did at the beginning of this project and a little bit about what we have planned, but now I’m back to tell you a bit more about how the project has taken shape.

I’m really proud of this project because it’s the biggest one that I’ve managed, and it’s involved a lot of people, a lot of hard work and a lot of planning and I’m really excited about launching the resources next month because, who cares about modesty, I think they’re great!!

A little bit about the pocket histories and picturebank

Our official description says this:

‘The pocket histories explore London’s history through objects from the Museum of London’s collections. Picturebank supports the pocket histories with images for educational use.’

Essentially, each pocket history topic takes 5 images (almost all of objects in the Museum’s collection) and uses them to tell the stories of London’s past.

In the Picturebank, users can search or browse by period or topic

These images (or most of them anyway) are then used in the picturebank where users (probably mainly in schools) can browse them by topic or by period, or just do a keyword search.  Once users have found an image, they can enlarge it, read a simple caption about it, use some prompt questions to start a discussion about it and find out whether or not it’s on display at the Museum.

The pocket histories cover loads of fascinating topics like

• What was life like in Tudor London?
• Why were London’s docks built?
• London Plagues 1348-1665
• What was life like for children in Victorian London?
• The ‘London Look’: London fashion trends 1950–2002
• Political Protest in London, 1750–1900

And we hope to add more in the coming years.

You’ll be able to read the pocket histories online, or download and print a PDF that’s all nice and designed and pretty if you’d prefer.

This is a sneak preview of what one of the nice, designed PDF versions look like

So who are they for?

The pocket histories are ideal for anyone who’s interested in London’s history and we’re hoping that they’ll gradually work become pages that people stumble on on Google even if they don’t necessarily know about the Museum of London.

As well as this general audience, we think they’ll be particularly useful for secondary school students doing research, primary school teachers preparing lessons or a visit to the Museum, or parents helping their children with homework or just helping them learn more about London’s history.

We designed the picturebank for a more specific schools and colleges audience because we think that it’ll work best on an interactive whiteboard or in an ICT suite.  The captions were written with children in mind and we’ve chosen the images that we’ve included very carefully to make sure that we can give teachers free rein to view, copy and print the images for use in their classroom or for private research (any other use, including sharing the resources would need to be negotiated with the Museum first).

About the project

One of the reasons I’ve most enjoyed this project is because I’ve worked with some really great people on it and I think this has been absolutely integral to why I’m so proud of the resources.  We have a core project team of two curators (Meriel Jeater and Beverley Cook), 4 audience-y type people (representing the schools team – Kirsty Sullivan, the inclusion team – Kirsty Marsh, the families team – Sandra Hedblad, and the adults team – Julie Carr), and a representative of the Information Resources Section (IRS) – Matthew Rose.  Having curators on board since the beginning of the project has really ensured that the topics we cover are grounded in our collection, our expertise, and the themes in our galleries.  Having representatives of all our target audiences on the team has been completely invalauble from the point of view of making sure that we create resources that are suitable for and interesting to all audiences.  And having the IRS perspective from Matthew who knows our collections management database inside out has been essential, particularly for the picturebank. We’ve also had a team of curators and writers outside the project team who we couldn’t have done without, and a host of other people across the museum who’ve been so helpful and so supportive.

We’ve had some brilliant discussions in our monthly project meetings where we took the time at the start to really think about why and how we would create the resources, and what we were trying to achieve. It’s meant that we thought  carefully about each one and it’s made them, I think, really strong, grounded, accessible and interesting resources (but that’s just me, you’ll have to let me know what you think when they go live!)

Nerdy goodness…

I alluded just now to our collections management database, and this leads me on to another really exciting (if maybe a little nerdy) part of the project.  I won’t go into the technical ins and outs, but a big advantage of our new picturebank is that it links to our collections management database. This means that if a curator takes an object off display, or maybe adds a bit more information to a record, or takes a photo of another aspect of it, once they update our collections management database, that information will be passed through to the picturebank – cool huh?

So I promise to try and blog again when the resources are up.  There’s no point me putting the links here yet because they’re not up yet, but I hope this gives you a bit of a sneak preview of what to expect, and hope you’ll be of the same opinion as me about them – I think they’re great!