Inside the Museum of London

Our Licensing Manager, Harriet Berry, shares further details of some the images from our collection recently licensed as greeting cards, on sale not only at our museums but around the country.

Today the focus is on iconic London photographer Henry Grant

There are nine iconic Henry Grant images in the new licensed greetings card collection, including those pictured here.

Henry Grant (1907 – 2004) was a London based photographer who started to work for a  news agency on Fleet Street in the 1940’s and pursued a career as a photojournalist. He was particularly skilled at capturing spontaneous moments of London life.

In 1986, the Museum acquired an archive of 80,000 photographs from the photographer.

You can discover other cards newly available via this licensing agreement in Harriet’s first blog on the subject here and there is still a chance to enter our competition to win a set of all 21 cards in the range. Simply post a comment below or tweet us with suggestions of a key Londoner from history you would send one of these cards to and why and the best suggestion as judged by our Retail Team will win!

Competition closes 6pm on Monday 23 May 2011.

Our Licensing Manager has been, over the last year, trawling through our vast and eclectic image collection to produce a fresh and varied range of greeting card images to be licensed and distributed through a partnership with Camden Graphics which is part of the UK Greetings family of companies.

The licensing deal will generate income for the Museum through royalties paid on the sale of each card.

This partnership will enable the Museum’s brand and collections to reach audiences all over the country, as the cards will be on sale in around 1,000 shops nationwide by the end of the year (and on sale in our Museum Shops and online from April 1st).

There are 21 cards in the collection, including textiles, ceramics, toys and a beautiful collection of nine black and white photographs by Henry Grant.

These images have been chosen to reflect the diversity of the Museum’s collections and we are now working on designs for Father’s Day and Christmas 2012.

Here is a small sample of four designs (front and back) from the collection:

For your chance to win a complete set of all 21 cards (worth over £50) post a comment below or tweet us with suggestions of a key Londoner from history you would send one of these cards to and why and the best suggestion as judged by our Retail Team will win!

Anish Kapoor: Turning the World Upside Down in Kensington Gardens from O Production Ltd. on Vimeo.

If you travel across the city by Tube and are anything like me you’ll have found yourself, in recent months, staring across the tracks at the thin, curved screens arriving where before were peeling billboards.  At first very little happened, but it was clear that ‘live’ advertising was about to start on the London Underground.

I found this quite exciting, in a distracting-yet-moving-with-the-times sense.  Of course I expected this excitement to be dampened instantly with advertisements extolling the virtues of life insurance or personal shopping.  Yet it doesn’t have to be that way.  The screen is only a blank canvas, a servant, and a project which has taken that literally is Smile For London.

They have invited film-makers to produce shorts – films, art or animation, to be cycled between advertisements on selected Tube platforms during the rush hour, between the 17th and 28th of January.  Participants include Aardman (the creators of Wallace and Gromit), Anish Kapoor, Laurie Hill, Light Surgeons and Amy Thornley.  Keira Knightley stars in a silent film called Maze made by artist Stuart Pearson Wright.

Last week the Museum of London hosted a celebration of the work of Smile for London, and an awards ceremony for the creative individuals and collectives who have taken part, with a showing of the shorts to be screened.  Until the 28th the Museum will continue to screen the shorts in its digital space by the Galleries of Modern London.

The Museum’s support for Smile for London is a reflection of its constant participation in the curation and also creation of London’s history.  It seems particularly fitting that thistakes place, for a short time on the London Underground, in Victorian tunnels on wartime platforms, obscured by 1980s carriages, seen by passengers carrying Oystercards and flicking through their Blackberrys.  So if you’re on the Tube from now until the 28th look up and Smile for London.

Welcome!

Welcome to the first post of the weblog that will be covering our work at a most important and exciting site in London’s Shoreditch, that of not just a theatre, but The Theatre, London’s first, purpose built playhouse, The Theatre of James Burbage and, of course, a certain William Shakespeare.

This will be a brief introduction to the site and the people working there.  Over the next few weeks we will be investigating a direct, physical connection with some of the giants of our cultural heritage and we want to show you a little of how archaeology works and to give you insights into what it can tell us about our past.

We will provide you with pictures, plans, videos and will keep you up to date with what we uncover and discover as work progresses.

We will introduce you to some more of the history of this place and the stories of those real people who were a part of that history, and of how the Tower Theatre Company is to revive a tradition of theatre on this site and protect this unique discovery.  It is, perhaps, more than a mere stroke of good fortune that a theatre will once again stand on this spot.

Tower Theatre Company

The Tower Theatre Company has made this work possible by funding the dig as a part of the site development.  You can find more details about them on their website:

http://www.towertheatre.org.uk

You can also find more details of the new and old Theatre at:

http://www.thetheatre.org.uk/index.htm

This site includes pictures, plans, video and details of the fundraising appeal to help pay for this important development.

We’d also like to thank Keltbray, the demolition and civil engineering specialists, who carried out the demolition of the previous building on site and are providing assistance on site over the course of the dig, Sir Robert McAlpine, civil engineers, who are the project management consultants for the project, Hannah Reed Civil and Structural Engineers who are working very closely with us to design the foundations of the new theatre around the remains of the old and the architects Bland, Brown and Cole who have managed to come up with a great outline design for the new theatre, based on the foundations that can be got in around the archaeology!

Dramatis personae

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances….

So, enter then, our humble players (from left to right): Ralph, Charlotte, Heather (in charge on site), Mark and Val.  These are the archaeologists who will be digging the site; they are backed up by a large team at Museum of London Archaeology including photographers, surveyors, finds and environmental specialists and processors and researchers to name but a few, but more of them later.

The story so far…..

Over the last few years we have been building up to this excavation, with geophysical surveys (using technology to “see” into the ground) and with small evaluation trenches.  To see some of the work from last year’s evaluation, follow this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=savcpQFVu8w

and Heather will show what went on.

In the last few weeks the final preparations have been completed: the last of the 19th-century warehouse that stood on the site has been demolished, the modern concrete floor broken up and taken away, the cabins containing the all important kettle are in place, the old evaluation trenches cleared and the digging has begun.

Already, the ground is yielding more of its secrets, 18th and 19th-century buildings, signs of local industries such as glass making, The Theatre and, predating The Theatre, parts of buildings that formed the large Holywell Priory, founded in the 12th-century and once the ninth richest in the country, more of that and the other discoveries in the next few weeks.

Finally, for this post, we leave you with a face:

Does he look familiar?  We’ll explain more in the next post as well as bring you the latest finds, stories from site and the past.

So, the stage is set, the players have their parts, the curtain has risen and more anon!

Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say goodnight, until it is next time……

Some of you may remember from my last blog that I mentioned that the Museum of London websites were changing inline with our rebranding to bring together our  venues and values, with new names and logos. We have now completed phase one of redesigning and moving around content on our websites. You can check out our striking new logos and our redesigned websites at:

• www.museumoflondon.org.uk
• www.museumoflondon.org.uk/docklands
• www.museumoflondon.org.uk/archaeology

In phase two and three, we will be auditing all our websites, holding audience evaluations to find out what our visitors think, and planning and implementing the migration of all our websites into one single site. This will involve analysis of our current website structures and planning the future architecture and redesigning of all the templates within our websites, including our microsites.

We would love to find out what you think of the websites and how it might develop in the future. So tell us what you think of the sites and the new ‘tabs’ that combine all our three venues together by sending me your comments to: webmanager@museumoflondon.org.uk.

Please note that we are aware some things may not display properly or some links may be broken, but please bear with us while we go through this transition period.

Thank you for all your continued support.

Did you know that road traffic accidents in London kill less than 1 person each day, while smoking cigarettes kills 1 Londoner every hour? Or that cigarette butts account for 40% of the litter on London’s streets? Despite these bleak statistics 2 million Londoners regularly light up to enjoy a cigarette.

One year on from the smoking ban, The Big Smoke looks at the history of smoking in London and life in the capital since the ban.

Curator Meriel Jeater says, ‘London has been a centre of the tobacco trade and consumption for 400 years and this topical display will look at how attitudes to smoking have altered over this time. The recent ban on smoking in public places is causing widespread changes and this display will showcase Londoners’ opinions on the ban and how it is affecting their city.

For some people the new legislation is the final prompt they needed to quit smoking. For others it is ruining their businesses. We want to know what Londoners think.’

You can visit ‘The Big Smoke’ at the Museum of London until 21 September 2008.  Entry is free.

Find out more at The Big Smoke article in our newsroom.

“There is a medieval mystery to solve, so let’s start digging.” So began the new BBC archaeological drama Bonekickers. Part Indiana Jones, part Da Vinci Code with a hint of Time Team, the programme is set in the style of most modern forensic crime series complete with sinister music and dark lighting.

If you missed it, the first episode this week portrayed a group of maverick archaeologists from the University of Wessex where “the excavation of 14th century medieval soldiers alongside Saracen coinage in Somerset leads to the hunt for the True Cross”. The show featured a fundamentalist Christian property developer with sword-wielding accomplices, scenes of faith healing, a beheading, and a dramatic conclusion that saw the team abseiling into a subterranean temple – and a fiery inferno that resulted in the destruction of perhaps one of the most significant finds discovered in the UK!!

So how does this compare to real life in an archaeological unit?

Real life archaeology is perhaps not fast paced enough to be compatible with the fictional world of television. We wait for developers and funding bodies to agree budgets, spend time agreeing sampling strategies, and await the results of radiocarbon dates sent to far-off laboratories rather than churning them straight out of a PC. We use our “archaeological imaginations” for the long drawn-out analyses of a site over time rather than for jumping to instant conclusions, a reality that may deter even the most detail-hungry script writer.

It was claimed at one point that “there is always something down there.” Having spent numerous occasions stood next to a machine digging holes only to find nothing, I can assure you that this is not always true. The next time I encounter a cavernous void, I shall remember to refrain from breaking out the mountaineering gear and lowering myself by rope into the abyss. It’s not unheard of to have random people walk across site, oblivious to signs warning of deep trenches, only to ask if treasure has been found. But the closest I have come to a fiery ending was when a machine driver, perhaps a little heavy-handed, decided to dig a little too close to a gas service.

As our heroes pieced together the evidence, ripping artefacts from the trench without a context sheet in sight and in immaculate attire without a hard hat or hi-vis jacket to be seen, I wondered if any of them were aware of the budget code or had filled out this week’s time sheet. The large expensive flat owned by one of the team, and the swanky laboratory, seemed a little far fetched but I look forward to brandishing my museum ID card in an authoritative FBI-style fashion to see what privileges it brings me.

The final scenes produced the declaration “please, please, for the love of Jehovah, may we go to the pub?” and with that came perhaps the most accurate portrayal of the archaeologist.

Mandela in London, 1962
Nelson Mandela will be celebrating his 90th birthday on 18 July 2008. To honour this occasion Museum of London remembers his first visit to London in June 1962 in a small photographic display that opens on 20 June 2008. The collection of 17 striking black and white photographs show a youthful Mandela in London – these were some of his last days of freedom.

This was Mandela’s first trip to the capital and it was to be his last for more than 30 years. Mandela returned to South Africa in August and was arrested and later imprisoned for 22 years.

Curator Cathy Ross says: ‘These photos are terrifically evocative: not only a reminder of London’s role in the anti-apartheid struggle during the 1960s, but also of Nelson Mandela’s extraordinary story. Despite being a wanted man, his optimism and warmth really shine through.’

You can view ‘Mandela in London, 1962′ for free at the Museum of London, London Wall, EC2Y 5HN, until 3 August 2008

Find out more in our newsroom article, Mandela in London, 1962.