The working life of Museum of London

All good things must come to end

The final week of the current Volunteer Inclusion Project reaches us and what an excellent project it has been. The set up for week 10 was a couple of hours of finds work  in the morning and a couple of hours of finds fun at the museum in the afternoon.

Monday and Tuesday’s volunteers had the pleasure of working with Glynn for the final time and completed another site, Northumberland Wharf (NW74), which we didn’t think we would get done during this project, so big thumbs up for that.

Wednesday and Thursday’s volunteers finished things off with Adam, completing all the general leather finds from Swan Lane (SWA81) and a couple of really small sites in their entirety; St Paul’s Cathedral Choir School (SPS74) and 64 Southwark Street (64SS74). Gold stars all round.

And so it was to the Museum of London itself for special behind the scenes visits to the museum’s library, archaeological conservation labs and a guided tour around the recently opened War, Plague & Fire gallery.

Museum Librarian Sally, very kindly showed us around the library and its archive as well as picking out some fine special boxes within its shelves.

Conservators Jill, Rose and Luisa showed us around their labs and included some amazing examples of freeze dried wood preservation and a reconstructed glass bowl.

Finally, curators Meriel & Jackie, highlighted the brilliant objects and themes of the museum’s 16th & 17th Century gallery.

And there we have it. Altogether, over all three strands of this project (general, registered, leather/textiles finds) we’ve worked on 68 excavation archives, which is just superb. A huge thanks needs to go to all our VIP5 volunteers, who have formed some excellent teams over the past 10 weeks. Special thanks should go to volunteers Magdelena and especially Wayne, who have provided this site with many excellent photographs.

Watch this space for news about our final two LAARC Volunteer Inclusion Projects (VIP6 (June-Aug) & VIP7 (Oct-Dec)), which we want to be even bigger and better than anything we’ve done before. In the meantime, don’t forget to have your say on which has been the best object from this current project. There’s still time to vote: Object of VIP

See you in June…