Victoria and Albert Museum

VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM

A special exhibition entitled ‘Raphael: Cartoons and ‘Tapestries for the Sistine Chapel’ is currently on at the Victoria and Albert Museum between September 8 and October 17. The exhibition was planned to mark Pope Benedict XVI’s state visit to Britain in September 2010. Four of the ten tapestries woven according to Raphael’s designs hang for very first time alongside the original cartoons, or templates inside the V&A. The Raphael Cartoons have always been a highlight of the museum. They make up seven of the series of ten, drawn by Raphael for Pope Leo X and are amongst the most important surviving examples of High Renaissance art.  King Charles I bought the cartoons in 1623 and they are on loan to the museum from the Queen.

 The Victoria and Albert Museum, commonly shortened to the ‘V&A’ spans five thousand years of art, from ancient times through to the present day and consists of items collected from across the four compass points of the globe. The Victoria and Albert Museum is located in an area of immense cultural, scientific and educational importance in West London. It is one of three large museums situated in South Kensington, the other two being the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum. The museum is spread over seven miles of corridors and it is where one can view the finest collection of applied and decorative arts in the world.

An astonishing six and a half million objects are under the museum’s care. Many are contained in the one hundred and forty-five galleries of the museum. Some of the collections are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world.  The vast quantity of exhibits determines that only a small percentage is ever on display. Nevertheless, the twelve and a half acres of exhibits is enough to keep visitors occupied for a full day and even then, it is only possible to scratch the surface.

The V&A’s collection of decorative arts and design was founded in 1852 and was partly built up with profits from The Great Exhibition of 1851. In the early years, the collection covered science and a number of exhibits were purchased from The Great Exhibition to form the nucleus of the collection. It was the first museum in the world to include a refreshments room, dating back to 1857.  A year later, late night openings were made possible with the use of gas lighting, which allowed the working classes to visit.

The museum we see today is faced in ornate terracotta, red brick and Portland Stone. Built by Aston Webb, the main façade is an eclectic mix of Renaissance and medieval influences. Aston Webb’s foundation stone was laid on the seventeenth of May 1899, unbeknown to those in attendance, the occasion was the last official public appearance by Queen Victoria.  During the ceremony, the museum’s name was changed from The South Kensington Museum to the Victoria and Albert Museum. Over the following decade, Aston Webb built onto the existing parts and his additions were opened by Edward VII in 1909. Sculptural images of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert are set into the external structure. Prince Albert appears on the main arch above the twin entrances with Queen Victoria seen above the frame around the arches and entrance.

The collection of art from Asia is one of the greatest in existence. It comprises more than one hundred and sixty thousand objects. The collections at the V&A are carefully grouped and subdivided. There are collections of furniture and furnishings, textiles, fashion, sculpture, metalwork, ceramics, glass, words and images, theatre and performance, prints, books, photographs, periods and styles, paintings and drawings, jewellery, cast courts, ceramics, architecture and many more.

The fashion and costume collection is the most comprehensive in Britain. There are more than fourteen hundred outfits, mostly dating from 1600 to the present day. In 2002 the museum acquired the Costiff collection of one hundred and seventy-eight costumes by the British fashion designer Vivienne Westwood. The purchase was made possible by the assistance of the National Art Collections Fund, which has funded many other acquisitions at the V&A.

On permanent display in the V&A, is the ‘Chelsea Carpet’ which is thought to date from the sixteenth century. Considered the most beautiful carpet in the world, it was bought on London’s fashionable King’s Road in the nineteenth century and its earlier history is entirely unknown. Another popular exhibit is the ancient 'Bed of Ware’, which was built for an inn in Hertfordshire. Dating to 1590, the bed is so large it could sleep fifteen adults. A curiosity from its earliest days, William Shakespeare mentioned the bed in ‘Twelfth Night’. Some of those who slept in the ‘Bed of Ware’ carved their names into the timber or applied their red wax seals, all of which are still visible today.

At the outbreak of the Second World War most of the collection was transferred  to a disused London Underground tunnel and also to a subterranean quarry in Wiltshire. Items too big to be shifted were bricked up ‘in situ.’ Fortunately, the museum survived the war with only minor damage, although sharp eyed visitors will pick out the pock marks still visible on the façade from shrapnel from bombs that fell nearby.

The museum’s curators not only care for the objects in the collection, but provide access to items that are not currently on display to the public. Indeed, much commitment is required in sorting the items in the repository that are not on display. Research continues to be maintained by the curators as an important area, despite underfunding. The museum runs an education department for both casual visitors and school groups. The various annex institutions are managed by the V&A’s own staff, including The Museum of Childhood in East London’s Bethnal Green.

Starting in 2001, the museum embarked on a major one hundred and fifty million pounds renovation programme. The major overhaul included the introduction of new galleries, shops, visitor facilities and the ‘John Madejski Garden’ that opened in 2005. However, a proposal for a spiral extension by the post-modernist architect Daniel Libeskind, caused a public uproar. Ultimately, the trustees voted to abandon the eighty million pounds project after failing to achieve a financial grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. From 2001 The Victoria and Albert Museum has been free of charge and it is open daily, from 10.00-17.45 (22.00 Fridays). The V&A is located on Cromwell Road, London SW7 2RL

Where to view 'Victoria and Albert Museum' and video clips of London. London in Motion has some of the best London Stock Footage and London Library Footage with moving clips of many of the above mentioned places to see, are available to browse through by simply visiting the ‘Victoria And Albert Museum’ category of this website.  New additions of London video clips are being frequently uploaded and further categories will be appearing over the coming months. 

Sherlock Holmes Museum

SHERLOCK HOLMES MUSEUM

Sherlock Holmes was the creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Raised in  genteel poverty, the author was the eldest son of a Scottish failed painter turned civil servant, who consoled himself with fishing and drink. His mother was Irish and said to have been a cultured, strong-minded woman. As a child, it was said of Conan Doyle that he, ‘might come home with a bloodied nose. No sooner was he in the door than his head was buried in a book.’ After university he qualified as a doctor and he began writing the stories to fill his time whilst waiting for patients, a luxury which today’s U.K. National Health doctors can only dream of. As an adult, Conan Doyle lost his Catholic faith and later became interested in spiritualism. His first wife appeared in his writings as Dr Watson’s wife. A keen sportsman, he was instrumental in raising the popularity of skiing in the United Kingdom and imported amongst the first sets of skis from Norway. Also an avid cricketer, he only ever took one wicket, nevertheless a wicket of historical significance, as he dismissed W.G. Grace, considered by many to be the greatest cricketer of all time, for one hundred and ten runs.

The first appearance of Sherlock Holmes was in the 1887 publication of Beeton’s Christmas Annual. The character was an eccentric and brilliant London based consulting detective, prone to much logical reasoning, who used his abilities as a master of disguise to help solve his cases. Sherlock Holmes was partially modelled on Conan Doyle’s university professor, Dr Joseph Bell, whose tendency to draw large conclusions from the smallest of observations was given to the fictional sleuth. Conan Doyle bestowed Holmes with many idiosyncratic habits, such as starving himself during periods of feverish mental activity, or his tendency to be a messy hoarder who knew exactly where whatever he wanted was to found.

Sherlock Holmes was a habitual user of cocaine, which he customarily injected in a seven per cent solution. He was also an occasional user of morphine, but he strongly disapproved of visiting opium dens, preferring to consume narcotics in the privacy of his lodgings. Doctor Watson, his only true friend, disapproved of his friend’s cocaine habit. Sherlock Holmes was a dispassionate man and he may have used cocaine to try to open his calcified heart. Throughout the stories, the only pleasure Sherlock Holmes derived from the company of women were the problems they brought him to solve and on those occasions he sparkled. Apart from mention of his bouts of boxing as a young man, he avoided physical contact. In one story Doctor Watson noted of his companion, ‘there is something positively inhuman in you at times.’ Doctor Watson was his only true friend. He provided practical assistance and played the role of Holmes’s chronicler. They developed a symbiotic relationship and for his part, Holmes supplied his mental vigour and the excitement that came from his extraordinary endeavours. 

At one point Sir Arthur Conan Doyle tired of Sherlock Holmes. He wrote to his mother, ‘I think of slaying Holmes…and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind off better things.’ So Conan Doyle had Holmes and Professor Moriarty apparently plunge to their deaths down the Reichenbach Falls in the 1893 tale ‘The Final Problem.’  The public uproar resulted in Holmes being brought back, but not before twenty thousand readers of Strand Magazine had cancelled their subscriptions. Sherlock Holmes ultimately featured in fifty-six short stories and four novels. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle developed many layers to the detective’s character and so convincingly was Holmes’s complicated persona brought to life in the readers’ minds that many began to forget that he was fictional character.

This confusion as to whether Sherlock Holmes was a real person or not has compounded down the decades and in many ways it is hardly surprising, as there is much to help feed the enduring popularity of the detective. In 1999 a nine feet high bronze of Sherlock Holmes was unveiled outside of Baker Street Underground Station in London. It has been described as ‘bearing some resemblance to the real Sherlock Holmes’ and such comments only add a vitality to Conan Doyle’s hero. On the opposite side of the road from the statue can be found the Sherlock Holmes pub. There are frequent Sherlock Holmes walking tours with guides enthusiastically recounting all the exploits of the great detective.  A commemorative blue plaque is even displayed on Baker Street, similar to those issued by English Heritage, which further adds to confusion over his existence or not. 

For many years a financial institution occupied the site of 221b and their employees always answered the fan mail. On average a staggering twenty letters were received each day and all were answered saying that Holmes has retired to Sussex where he is keeping bees, as was written in the final story. The bank moved out in 2002 and now the fan mail is directed to the nearby Sherlock Holmes Museum.

The Sherlock Holmes Museum is located at 231-241 Baker Street in central London, which is located only a short walk from the sleuth’s lodgings at 221b Baker Street. According to the stories, Holmes lived at this address between 1881 and 1904. Curiously, a real Doctor Watson, a manufacturer of artificial teeth, was found to have lived next door to the museum in the 1890’s.  It also transpired that a maid who worked in the lodging house that occupied the museum’s building in the 1930’s was related to a man by the name of Holmes.

The Sherlock Holmes Museum was founded in 1989 and opened its doors in 1990. It occupies a former Victorian lodging house, last used in 1936 and the rooms are faithfully maintained as they would originally have been. The first floor study overlooks Baker Street and it recreates much of what happened within its walls. There is evidence of the detective’s sometimes objectionable habits that Doctor Watson tells of, for example, bullet holes from Holmes’s shooting practise are marked in the wall forming ‘VR’ for Victoria Regina. Elsewhere, there is a carefully placed cigar in a butter dish. Tobacco can be seen in his slipper on top of the mantelpiece and a number of discarded opium needles can be spotted by the careful observer to spot.

Sherlock Holmes’s bedroom is adjoining the study and opposite it are stairs leading up to the second floor. Here can be found Doctor Watson’s bedroom and opposite is the landlady Mrs Hudson’s room, where she would lie in bed, sometimes disturbed by Holmes’s late night, cocaine addled violin playing. There is a further floor above, with wax figures of characters familiar from the stories. To accompany the visit, Sherlock Holmes buffs are offered a questionnaire to fill out for entertainment as they move along. After completing the tour of the rooms, a cafe bearing Mrs Hudson’s name offers Victorian cuisine and afternoon teas. A memorabilia shop sells books, replicas of his typical pipe, deerstalker hats and walking canes, etc.

A man dressed in a Victorian policeman’s outfit is usually positioned to greet visitors at the entrance to the museum. An elderly chap is generally seen, acting as Dr Watson, who guides the visitors and offers friendly chit-chat. Out of work actors, seemingly hired for their Holmes-like large noses, distribute his calling card whilst standing at the entrance to Baker Street London Underground Station. Wearing the sleuth’s customary attire, they spend the day having their photograph taken with tourists before encouragingly pointing them in the direction of the museum. 

The Sherlock Holmes Museum is open every day of the year except for Christmas Day between 9.30am and 6pm. The museum staff says that most people spend between half an hour to forty-five minutes looking around. There is no disabled access except for the shop and restaurant. Photography is permitted for non-commercial purposes. The museum is managed by members of the ‘Sherlock Holmes International Society’.

Where to view Sherlock Holmes Museum and video clips of London

London in Motion has some of the best London Stock Footage and London Library Footage with moving clips of many of the above mentioned places to see, are available to browse through by simply visiting the ‘Sherlock Holmes Museum’ category of this website.  New additions of London video clips are being frequently uploaded and further categories will be appearing over the coming months. 

London Bridge

LONDON BRIDGE

In early September of 2010, musician Nick Franglen made London Bridge create its own unique musical sound. Over an uninterrupted twenty-four time period, Nick Franglen positioned a theremin beneath an arch on the south side of the bridge. The instrument created washes of sound, partly formed by pedestrian traffic that changed in density throughout the day until it almost ceased in the early hours.  A hidden light beam on the bridge registered each passing person and it momentarily muted the gentle ululations of the theremin. A filmed loop of the performance, titled 'Hymn To London Bridge' will be shown during the Thames Festival on the eleventh and twelfth of September 2010. Those walking over the bridge were as oblivious to their participation in this project as they likely were to much of London Bridge's long and extraordinary history.
A river crossing at London Bridge dates back to Roman times, making it the oldest bridge over the Thames in London and one that has rebuilt time and again over its two thousand year old history. It is forty miles from the open sea. Previous bridges have either sunk into the Thames mud, destroyed by a tornado, pulled down by warriors, partly burned down by rioting peasants and even sold and transported stone by stone to a location on the other side of the world. Every time the bridge has been rebuilt, as down the centuries it was always known that London Bridge is perhaps the most important single factor contributing to the existence of London itself.

A wooden bridge across the Thames existed by about half way through the first century AD and it was probably a military pontoon bridge. The Roman trading settlement of Londinium was built alongside their bridge on the north bank. There are several theories as to why the Romans bridged the Thames here. It is known that the river at that time was significantly wider and shallower at this point. It may have been tidal to that point only, or there may have been a usefully positioned midstream islet. What is certain, is that the bridge was where two Roman roads met, the great highways of Watling Street and Stane Street. After the Romans left, it is thought that the bridge fell into disrepair.

In the Saxon period, the bridge was repaired and formed a political boundary between the kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex. The Norwegian Prince Olaf pulled down the bridge in 1014, giving rise to the ancient and still popular rhyme, “London Bridge is falling down” and a new bridge was built by 1016. From this time the bridge’s history is well documented, with the Norman’s building their own bridge after the Conquest, only for it to be destroyed by the destructive London tornado of 1091. It was rebuilt by slaves belonging to William II, then destroyed yet again by fire in 1136. The replacement was not deemed suitably permanent and construction of the strongest and largest bridge yet, began in 1176 and was only finished in 1209 during reign of King John.

Of the many London bridges, it is this, the 1209 bridge that is the most famous. Numerous paintings and drawings provide a useful insight as to how the bridge looked and remarkably, had the bridge survived a few years longer, it would have been recorded on an early form of photography. King John licensed the building of wooden houses on the bridge to bring in useful revenue for the bridge’s upkeep. There were soon many shops at street level with the storekeepers living above. Some buildings were up to seven stories high, with the top floors connected to the buildings on the opposite side, creating a tunnelled effect. The roadway between the houses became very congested and sometimes it took an hour to pass over, so many still chose ferrymen as they offered the quickest crossing.

In the centre of the bridge stood St Thomas’s Chapel, complete with a river level entrance for those arriving to worship by boat. Curiously, the ferrymen usually avoided going under the bridge itself. The bridge had nineteen arches, which  restricted the water flow, acted as a barrage. Ferocious rapids formed between piers and many drowned whilst attempting to navigate between them. There was sometimes a two metre difference to the water level on either side. The barrage effect made the river more susceptible to freezing over in winter, leading to the popular frost fairs.

At each end stood a fortified gate with spikes, on which the heads of traitors were exposed. William Wallace’s head was the first to be displayed in 1305, starting a tradition that was to last for three hundred and fifty-five years. The heads of Thomas Moore and Thomas Cromwell also at one time adorned the gates. The bridge was considered a safe place to live because the gates were shut at curfew. The inhabitants were healthier too, the river air gave them some protection from pestilence. People continued to live on the bridge all the way through until 1758 when, after a fire, the surviving buildings were demolished for ever. Fires destroyed the buildings on the bridge many times but never the bridge itself. London Bridge was much loved and it was not uncommon for widows to leave their wedding rings towards its upkeep. Records survive that in the year 1300, one Johanna Bytheweye left twelve pence in her will towards the upkeep of London Bridge.  Surviving from 1209 until its demolition in 1830, London Bridge served the citizens of London for over five centuries.

It had been the lone crossing over the Thames in London until 1729, when in that year Putney Bridge opened. By the turn of the nineteenth century, it was clear a new bridge was needed. Work began in 1825 to designs by the engineer John Rennie. The new bridge was positioned one hundred feet upstream, allowing the old bridge to keep open during construction. Rennie’s bridge was opened in 1831 by King William IV, with finishing touches only completed the following year. New approach roads cost three times the sum of the bridge itself, with the entire project costing a whopping two and a half million pounds, which is almost two hundred million today. HMS Beagle, the ship used by Charles Darwin on his voyage of discovery, was the first ship to pass beneath the new London Bridge.

After widening work in 1901, the increased weight of traffic on the bridge started it to slowly but steadily sink into the mud of the Thames basin. By the nineteen sixties, 20,000 vehicles and 110,000 foot passengers were crossing it daily which exasperated the situation. The bridge had survived less than one hundred and fifty years. John Rennie’s bridge was dismantled in 1967 with the novel idea of selling it. The 10,276 numbered granite blocks were reconstructed and it now stands in Lake Havasu City, in Arizona, crossing the diverted waters from the Colorado River. Rumours that they thought they had purchased London’s Gothic castellated Tower Bridge at a bargain price were strenuously denied for years. However, Stan Usinowicz the managing editor of Lake Havasu City local newspaper admitted, shortly before he died, that C.V. Wood, an architect involved with building Lake Havasu City, admitted it was true.

The current London Bridge was opened on the seventeenth of March 1973 by Queen Elizabeth IIThe bridge cost only four million pounds to build, a fraction of the cost of the previous bridge and the funding was met entirely by the City Bridge Trust. It is less decorated than many other of London’s crossings, but despite being built at the height of modernism, it is fortunately an attractive looking bridge. It is borne on three arches of pre-stressed concrete faced with granite. It carries 38,000 vehicles on the A3 road across the Thames and 25,684 pedestrians on a daily basis, meaning that in forty years the foot traffic has halved and the vehicular traffic has doubled. Whether the bridge meets with a fate similar to some of its predecessors, only time will tell. For certain, as long as there is a London, there will be a London Bridge.  

Where to view 'London Bridge' and video clips of London:

London in Motion has some of the best London Stock Footage and London Library Footage with moving clips of many of the above mentioned places. They are available to browse through by simply visiting the ‘London Bridge’ category of this website.  New additions of London video clips are being frequently uploaded and further categories will be appearing over the coming months. 

Monsoon Building

MONSOON BUILDING

The former Paddington Maintenance Depot, off the Harrow Road in northwest London, was occupied by Monsoon between 2001 and 2009. Monsoon and Accessorize is a clothing chain that was founded by Peter Simon in 1972. He started off by trading ethnic apparel on the Portobello Road and when ‘faraway fashion’ became increasingly popular, his business grew. Today there are over four hundred Monsoon and Accessorize stores throughout the United Kingdom  and six hundred further outlets in fifty-four countries across the four compass points of the world.

It was typical of Peter Simon’s thinking ‘outside of the box’ to move his business into the abandoned depot, nicknamed ‘The Battleship.’ However, within only years of occupation it became clear that Monsoon had outgrown this building and they   decided to relocate further west to purpose built headquarters at the ‘Yellow Building’ in Notting Dale, in the north-western corner of the W11 area, near to the new Westfield shopping centre. Construction of the ‘Yellow Building’ was underway in 2007 and most parts of the Monsoon business had moved in by 2009.

The Paddington Maintenance Depot was designed by Paul Hamilton of ‘Bicknell & Hamilton.’ He was born Paul Albert Herschan in Vienna in 1924.  A Jew, he was fortunate to reach Britain under the Kindertransort scheme in 1939 and he went on to lose nearly all his relatives in the Holocaust. As soon as he was old enough, he signed up with the British Army and was advised to take a ‘nom de guerre.’ He was on army training in Glasgow at the time and he saw a bus heading to the local town of Hamilton, so he chose the name in order to preserve his initials. He saw much action in The Second World War, both in Europe and the East. On decommission, he was drawn to helping rebuild bomb riddled London and he studied architecture.

Railway architecture became Paul Hamilton’s speciality and he developed a particular fascination with designing signal boxes. Chosen for the Paddington Maintenance Depot project, Hamilton presented the designs in 1964, work began in 1967 and the building opened in 1969. It was touted as the first London building to come to terms with the symbolisation of a modern transport building. It is located right at the hub of three forms of transportation, a main road, a canal and a railway. The building is right at edge of elevated A40, so it can be seen by everyone travelling into or out of London on the M40. (See earlier blog: WESTWAY.)

Small in area but powerful in profile, the building has a reinforced concrete frame, clad on the upper floors with a glazed ceramic mosaic. It has an irregular, expressionist, triangular plan with four main storeys, topped with a flat roof. The building was divided into two distinct functional parts, with a train shed below the workshops and offices.  The design included a distinctive boiler house. There are bands of continuous, metal, mullion-light glazing on the first and upper floors. The main levels are open plan and contain a staircase with a sinuous, ceramic-clad balustrade.

The building marked the culmination of the British post war railways building programme, which began with lightweight prefabs through to this monument to the  ‘machine aesthetic.’ After being vacated by British Rail, the Paddington Maintenance Depot became offices during the 1980’s, but was empty by 1990. Squatters moved in and shortly before work started for Monsoon, a huge illegal rave took place at the premises in October 1999. A well documented event, the interior of the building was completely trashed over a forty-eight hour period and afterwards only the streamlined, sculptural blocks of Brutalist concrete remained unscathed.

Care was taken to consult the original architect Paul Hamilton for advice during the renovation of the building for Monsoon’s occupation. The refurbishment, costing ten million pounds, was deemed a sympathetic transformation, offering forty-six and a half thousand square feet of office space for the clothing retailer. Such was its success, that the work, carried out by the ‘Alfred Hall Monaghan Morris’ practice, was given the Royal Fine Arts Commission Trust Award for 2002. Paul Hamilton died in 2004. The Paddington Maintenance Depot was given Grade II* Listed Building status in his lifetime. The building is located at the Paddington Goods Yard, London W2, just off Harrow Road.