The working life of Museum of London

The last few weeks, since returning after the Christmas holidays, have been busy and full of very different activities! Last Wednesday I went to the new Ebbsfleet International Eurostar station in Kent to help set up a display of artefacts that were discovered during the archaeological excavations that had taken place along the route of the railway. There is now an exhibition in the station, so if you are going to Ebbsfleet to catch a train keep an eye out for the display.

Then on Thursday, I went to Wandsworth. The museum there, Wandsworth Museum, has been closed and has to move out of the building where is has been for about the last eleven years. It’s a really sad situation for the staff involved as at the moment they are unsure of what is going to happen to the museum in the future. The Museum of London had loaned a number of objects to the Wandsworth Museum and so my job was to go there and remove the objects from the displays and package them for transportation back to the Museum of London. Wandsworth was a fantastic Museum and we all felt very sad doing this work.

On Saturday I took a group of students from University College London around some of the Roman sites in the City of London. My job includes occasional weekend work and usually it is this sort of thing – a tour or an activity in the galleries. It was a very enjoyable day, starting at the Roman City wall near the Tower of London and ending at the Museum of London in the late afternoon to look at the display of Roman metal vessels recently recovered by PCA Archaeology during an excavation in the City.

In between those days, I have been working on returning objects to our stores, updating object data on our computerised cataloguing system and answering queries, amongst other things.