The working life of Museum of London

Our Primary Schools Programme Manager Nina Sprigge, reveals more about the build up to Kids Takeover Day 2011 at the Museum of London.

From the early 1950s through to the 1980s the photographer Henry Grant was out documenting the everyday lives and experiences of Londoners. He was a freelance photographer by trade but between assignments he would take pictures of the people of London.

His photographs offer a window into the real lives of Londoners over four decades.

His work starts with an austere post war London and includes his interest in demonstrations, immigrant communities, the rise of youth culture and children at play.

The Exploring 20th Century London project, which has over 300 of his pictures online, has made this audio slideshow (click here) about Grant and his 30 year documentation of London and it’s people.

Exploring 20th Century London will be posting Henry Grant themed tweets and facebook posts throughout the week from 16-21 August. You can follow these at twitter.com/Exploring20CLdn and facebook.com/Exploring20thc.London.

Prints of Henry Grant’s pictures can also be purchased through the Museum of London Picture Library.

Many of Henry Grant’s pictures feature in the Museum of London hugely successful free exhibition London Street Photography which you can catch until 4 September.

Following on from our recent posts concerning the documenting of the PLA Archive we now move on to the conservation process.

Have you ever seen such beautifully wrapped volumes?! If only all the archive could look so neat!

This is the work of Rosalind Foley, a student who has just completed a year’s training in paper conservation at University of the Arts, Camberwell. She loves to make boxes and re-package and is currently volunteering with us one day a week, helping to clean and pack the Port of London Authority Archive.

Working alongside her are Dominic Flook and Kate Barber. They are spending hours of their time gently hoovering and brushing away the years of London grime that’s gradually settled on the documents that are now so precious to us in the archives.

Out of interest, the little vacuum cleaner attachments are the same as the ones you can buy for when (ok, if) you clean the inside of your car!

Much of the volunteers’ time is spent gradually removing dirt from papers using ‘smoke sponges’. As there was so much chimney soot and smoke produced in London during the 19th century, this dirt attached itself to documents and now needs to be removed. Smoke sponges act like erasers, gently removing dirt without the need to dampen the documents. In some ways I suppose we are brushing away history, but then again we need to conserve the documents too!

The extra soft goat hair brushes were bought by one of our conservators when she was on holiday in Hong Kong.

We are making great strides with the cataloguing project. We’ll update you again soon.

Claire Frankland

Port & River Archivist and Project Manager.

Following on from Marie-Claire’s earlier blog post on documenting the Port of London Authority Archive , Marie-Claire now moves on to cataloguing the archive of the longest-lived of the dock companies, the East and West India Dock Company (EWIDC).

This is a very different challenge: not only are there far more documents, but their structure is far more disrupted. Having learnt from our previous cataloguing, we decided to vary our approach. While it is essential to list some material at item level, others fall into sub-groups which can be adequately listed more briefly at series level.  This approach has been taken in relation to the documentation of a Working Agreement set up between the EWIDC and the main other dock company, the London and St Katherine Docks Company in an attempt to stop the competitive reduction of the rates charged for use of the companies’ docks which had brought the EWIDC to the brink of bankruptcy.

The Working Agreement heralded the beginning of the end for both dock companies as separate entities, and they merged in 1901. The EWIDC Minute Book for this period contains delightful evidence of the affection in which the company was held by some of its employees. At the end of the final entry, with the company formally wound up, an anonymous hand has added “Good Bye. R.I.P.”

It is interesting to see this sentiment in relation to the dock company, perhaps balancing the usual perception of the companies as the villains in contemporary labour relations. I should add that the more typical view is also reflected in the collection!

Written by our cataloguer, Marie-Claire Wyatt.

Look out for our next PLA Archive blog post as we focus on the work undertaken to conserve  these fragile paper records.

What do sugar, bridge construction, the Temperance Movement and the discovery of a pre-historic skeleton have in common? Well, they are just some of the subjects documented in the archive of the Port of London Authority (PLA) housed at the Museum of London Docklands.

Cataloguer, Marie-Claire Wyatt, explains more:

A few months ago the project to document the PLA Archive entered an exciting new stage, with the start of formal cataloguing. As you can see from the examples above, the archive has a very broad range of contents. However, its primary purpose is to document the history of the docks of London since the creation of the first enclosed dock system (the West India Docks) in 1799, along with the administration of the River Thames. The archive was collected during the 1970s and 1980s and has hitherto received very little cataloguing. The archive is quite disorganised, with no trace of “original order” – the structure of the papers while they were in use by their creators.

We have therefore chosen to give the archive a structure based on business function. It is deeply satisfying reuniting records which have been separated ever since their arrival at Museum of London Docklands and creating a formal structure which will enable the full history of the dock companies to be properly interpreted.

Due to the size of the collection, as a first stage we are concentrating upon the records of the nineteenth century docks. The docks were built by private dock companies over a period between 1799 and 1886, and were subject to the normal practices of competition and the need to offer shareholders an annual dividend. Relations between the dock companies could therefore be highly strained at times, a subject to which I hope to return in a future post.

Each dock company is being catalogued individually, and to get a sense of how this might work we began by listing the records of the East India Dock Company and the West India Dock Company, both companies with relatively small archives and therefore a simple collection structure. The catalogues for these will eventually live on MIMSY, the Museum’s catalogue system.

For these we tried listing everything at a very detailed level, so each minute book, financial ledger and file of papers documenting the construction or extension of the docks has been given its own description.  This is how I prefer to catalogue: it improves my knowledge of the creator and the background to the collection, in most cases the individual items are interesting in themselves and the descriptions are the most useful to researchers. It is, however, very time-consuming!

Having cut our teeth on these two small sub-collections, we moved on to cataloguing the archive of the longest-lived of the companies, the East and West India Dock Company (EWIDC)….more on this in my next update!

As we gear up for our Gladiator Games next month, we have the latest update from our gladiators in training to share with you.

Britannia (our gladiator re-enactors) recently attended a training session at the Lunt in Coventry (a reconstructed wooden Roman fort). The event was captured by professional photographer Pete Webb and will feature in the June issue of the science and technology magazine, Flipside (external link).

The Lunt is a great site and has the advantage of a sand filled wooden Gyrus (circular Roman cavalry training area).

Gladiators are starting to wear the full equipment as you can see from the images. Not only that, but this was their first training on deep sand, a surface we hope to have at the Guildhall in July.

The advantage of this material is the grip underfoot and the fact that it’s easier to land without serious impact injury – however it’s very tiring to work on, and it’s easier to see why excavated gladiator skeletons have more developed ankle bones than seen on other bodies from this time period.

Catch-up on our earlier training updates by clicking on ‘Special Events’ in the ‘Categories’ option to the right of this post and look our for more news from our gladiators as the games draw closer.

Images copyright Pete Webb / Flipside Magazine.

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

In advance of our Gladiator Games this July and with the kind permisssion of the publisher, The History Press, we are able to share with you extracts from the book “The World of the Gladiator” by author Susanna Shadrake. Who is also an historical adviser for our gladiator reinactors Britannia who are competing at our games.

Susanna’s book provides us with insight and context for both the preparations and the nature of the combat you can experience over the two days of our games taking place on the site of London’s original Roman amphitheatre, now the Guildhall Yard.

The First Amphitheatres

Amphitheatres had already existed outside Rome, in neighbouring Camania, since at least the end of the second century BC, and certainly from around 70 BC, when Pompeii’s amphitheatre was constructed. By the end of the republic, there were already more than 10 amphitheatres in Campania, Lucania and Etruria, with the majority of those in Campania, the main candidate for the origin of the gladiatorial combats, as well as for the amphithetares themselves.

An amphitheatre in the Guildhall Yard

The reign of Domitian coincided with a fresh phase of the London amphitheatre, and by that time the gladiatorial categories and the conventions of the arena were well known. Hundreds of amphitheatres across Europe and North Africa recreated in lesser scale what the Colosseum achieved at Rome.

Seating and tickets: social status set in stone

Contrary to the popularly held belief that the Colosseum was filled with the screaming mob, it is more realistic to assume that seats in this amphitheatre, as in most others, were allocated according to status, and in line with the client system of patronage which ran through every relationship in Rome.

Humbler Romans without family or business connections may have got in to the munera only by paying through the nose for the privilege (some magistrates rented out seats), some tickets undoubtedly filtered down to the lower orders, but not in significant numbers.

Reconstructing the spectacle

The first decision to be made in recreating this kind of spectacle is how far to go in bringing authenticity to an ancient entertainment whose central element was the unavoidably deliberate bloodshed. The decision was taken that the integrity of the original events that occured at the Guildhall in the middle to late first century AD should be respected.

Disclaimers would be necessary to ensure that everyone [is] aware that, although it was not real, we would be seeking a real response.

On the history side of things, the overall time period of the portrayal had to be carefully considered; a British based society such as Britannia would be best placed to recreate the dynamic Flavian period of the late first and early second centuries.

Despite the less forgiving climate of Britain compared to Rome or its Mediterranean environs, the indications are that the climate was slightly warmer, so wherever possible the principle of exposed flesh and partial armouring [are] retained to re-inforce the image of the gladiator.

All extracts (c) The History Press / Susanna Shadrake.

The World of the Gladiator (ISBN 978-0-7524-3442-1) by Susanna Shadrake is published by the History Press and is available from the Museum’s Shop.

Uncover more background on the upcoming Gladiator Games via our previous blog updates here.

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)

In advance of our Gladiator Games in July, and following on from our last post detailing the filming of our upcoming Streetmuseum Londinium app (click here to read), we have the latest news from our gladiators in training as they took the opportunity for a little extra practice and helped out a friend who wanted to run the London Marathon dressed as a Roman Legionnaire!

On the weekend of the royal wedding the gladiators from Britannia were performing at Flag Fen Bronze Age Centre in Peterborough.

Following their scheduled Roman shows, and after the public had left the site, they took the opportunity to squeeze in a little extra training before the Guildhall Yard shows on 30 & 31 July.

The routine between a Thraex and Hoplomachus is beginning to take shape and everyone was pleased with the results.

Testing of new large scutae (shields), planned to be used in the games, were also supported by two Provocators.

The routines are still mainly rehearsed un-armoured and as soon as a combat sequence is mastered, the armour gets added.

Our gladiators also recently heard from Tim Rees, who wanted to run this year’s London Marathon dressed as a Roman Legionary.

Britannia were only too happy to support Tim by lending him some ‘classic’ legionary kit from the Flavian period (late 1st Century AD).

Tim ran in improvised caligae (Roman miltary sandals) – without the hobnail base! He also found the wool tunic worked brilliantly, as when wet, it kept him nice and cool.

Tim completed the marathon in just under 5 hours and was pleased to report he did not walk a single step.

Catch up on previous Gladiator Games blog posts here.