Museum day

Finally, after such a long time and determination, I visited the Museum of London, Docklands this morning. And what a brilliant museum it is.

Having dropped Mirinda off at the ferry, I wandered around to the closest Starbucks for my usual latte before heading out the back to the West India Quay. The museum opened at 10am and I was pretty much the first person there. This was only one part of how brilliant it was.

MoL Docklands

The tour starts on the third floor and you wander through the history of the Thames and the early years of London. The Romans, followed by the silly Saxons who apparently despised the Romans so much that they refused to reuse their perfectly built trading port and set up a bit further upriver. When the Vikings came and then the Normans, they realised that the Romans knew what they were doing and, therefore, abandoned the Saxon site to return to the Roman one. And so it remained and grew.

There were lots of delightful displays of boats and ship building (though, sadly, not much on the Thames Ironworks) but, the best model of all is the massive one of the medieval London Bridge – the one with all the buildings on it and the first stone structure across the river. The details for the model were taken from paintings, drawings and written accounts of the bridge and is as accurate as it’s possible for a model to be.

I learned all about the starlings (the big brick pylons upon which the bridge sat as it spanned the river) and the drawbridge which effectively shut the crossing off in times of attack. There are also the pikes upon which heads of executed people were pinned in order to deter other would be miscreants.

One of the highlights is the fact that the model is in two halves. The first section you come to is the bridge from around 1450 then, having read the copious labels, you move around it and find the bridge in about 1600.

Here’s a drawing made in 1616 of the bridge as it was then. If you look closely, you can see the heads on pikes at what was called Traitor’s Gate.

London Bridge (1616) by Claes Van Visscher

While it was an amazing engineering wonder, it created a few problems with the tidal flow of the Thames with all the starlings interfering with the width of the river. It also became increasingly difficult for ships to move beyond the bridge. Even so…what an amazing structure and, equally amazing model.

The other brilliant exhibit in the museum is Sailortown. This is a faithfully reproduced section of Wapping Junction in 1840. You walk down narrow alley ways, passed a tavern and a few shops, on a fake cobbled road. The walls appear to be ancient brickwork and the atmosphere is almost dank. A wonderful display which gives the visitor a very real feel for the period and place.

Sailor Town

I can’t really finish a report on the museum without discussing the evocative section on slavery which begins with a sort of apologia to how slavery is handled while being abhorred. The short video is quite strong and makes you think about how it was to lose your entire identity.

The only problem with this display is the fact that it doesn’t confront the fact that the Roman and Saxon settlements would also have been built by slaves, displaced and captured during various battles and conquests. This is a tad isolationist, if you ask me. It’s true, we shouldn’t forget about the horrible period of black slavery and how a lot of Britain was built on the trade but it’s also important to remember the unknown and unnamed slaves who were there at the earliest period of London’s foundation.

That’s what I think, anyway.

One of the best things was that I was almost alone in the museum for my entire, two hour, visit. A handful of mothers and their small children, was all I saw. It made it so much more enjoyable.

I then went shopping at Canary Central. It will take me a while to work out the optimal time to go shopping here but I now know that 12:30 is seriously not it. Talk about crowds. Even the express check-outs at Waitrose had long, lingering queues threading back through the supermarket.

Mirinda caught an early afternoon ferry back and I went and met her. It was like the old days when I would meet her at Farnham station every night.

After a few hours work at the flat (for her) we went for a walk around Mudchute Farm (an odd little piece of land given over to farm animals and small fields) before heading back to the flat.