Collection: London Museum

Collection-level records:

• Collection history (Collection development policy)

  The Museum of London’s collection, called The London Collection, has a history going back nearly 200 years. It is the world’s largest collection relating to a single urban centre, it covers over 450,000 years of the history of this place, and it is the most important source for the material evidence of London’s past. It was originally formed of collections from two earlier museums: the Guildhall Museum and the London Museum.

  The Corporation of London established the Guildhall Museum in 1826. Its collection of antiquities was built up during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with items coming from construction sites in the City of London. The Museum confined its collecting to items found largely within ‘the Square Mile’, an area delineated by the medieval walled city, and from the Thames. It acquired other material relating to the civic and ceremonial history of the City of London as well as architectural fixtures and fittings.

  The London Museum, founded in 1911, had a much broader and ambitious collecting brief. With a specific populist agenda to tell the story of the history of London from earliest times through to the present, it collected from across London, not just from the City. The Museum was the brainchild of two politicians: Lewis, first Viscount Harcourt and Reginald Brett, second Viscount Esher. For much of its existence, the Museum was funded by central government. Guy Laking (later Sir Guy), the Museum’s first Keeper and Secretary to the Trustees, played an important role in building the collections. Under his, and then Mortimer Wheeler’s keepership, a collection of national and international standing was created covering antiquities, fine and decorative arts, dress and textiles, vehicles, rare books, maps, manuscripts and printed ephemera. J.G. Joicey was perhaps the Museum’s most generous benefactor. He loaned, and later gifted, his large collection of porcelain, clocks and watches, jewellery, embroidery and costume, as well as on his death in 1919 leaving the Museum the residue of his considerable estate to support acquisitions.

  After the Second World War, both the Guildhall Museum and the London Museum found themselves in temporary homes. The destruction of large parts of the City in the Blitz provided an opportunity for large scale archaeological excavations. During the 1950s, discussions took place positing the amalgamation of the two museums to form a single entity. In 1965, the Museum of London was established by an Act of Parliament and in 1976 the new museum opened to the public at London Wall. The suite of galleries presented a three dimensional biography of the capital, drawing on many items from the newly combined collections as well as more recent acquisitions.

  The greatest areas of growth in The London Collection over the last forty years have been in archaeology and material relating to London’s modern history. In 1976, the Museum had two field units, one for the City of London and one for Greater London, with complete archives of archaeological records and finds being acquired on a site-by-site basis. In 1991, the two units were restructured into one service and in 2002 an Archaeological Archive and Research Centre opened in Hackney where the finds and records from individual excavations are deposited and stored. In 2003, the Centre for Human Bioarchaeology was created, to care for and research the human skeletal remains. In 2011, Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) was split from the Museum to form an independent limited charitable company, although finds continue to be deposited at the Museum of London’s Archaeological Archive. Other finds made by ‘mudlarks’ on the Thames foreshore are regularly added to the collection.

  The Museum was a pioneer in collecting contemporary material from all walks of London life. Items were acquired from domestic environments as well as the work and leisure spaces of the capital. The closure of London’s upriver docks and wharves in the 1970s and 1980s spurred a new collecting initiative, particularly tools and equipment used in the port, in order to preserve a vanishing part of London’s heritage. In 2003, a museum to display this material, the Museum of London Docklands, opened in a converted Georgian dock warehouse opposite Canary Wharf. The Museum’s engagement with contemporary London continues with Curating London (2018-2022), funded by Arts Council England, which aims to be both a contemporary collecting initiative and an innovative community engagement project, transforming the Museum’s relationship with Londoners. Over the period of the project, 12 locally-based studies and four pan-London thematic projects will encourage new ways of working and embedding our collecting within local partnerships and networks.

  Oral history was a new area of collecting for the Museum in the late 1980s. Many interviews were made over the next two decades, creating a wide ranging and important collection, which is especially strong in material relating to immigration into the city in the post-war period, and in material relating to the lives of those associated with the river and the working history of the docks. It includes interviews by famous history workshop historians such as Raphael Samuel and Jerry White, as well as the audio interviews recorded by London Weekend Television for the series The Making of Modern London. In 2014, the Museum completed the digitisation of its entire oral history collection which, to date, amounts to over 5000 hours of recording.

  The photographic collection expanded rapidly after the opening of the Museum of London. A small collection had been built up by the London Museum, but it was only with the appointment of a dedicated curator of historic photographs that the collection began to develop in focused way. Paintings, prints and drawings acquisitions also increased after 1976 with help from funding agencies and charities. Major acquisitions included George Elgar Hicks’ ‘The General Post Office, One Minute to Six’ of 1860 (1990), the ‘Rhinebeck Panorama’ of London, 1806 (1998) and two works by Henry Nelson O’Neil, ‘Eastward Ho! August 1857′ and ‘Home Again, 1858′ (2004). More recently, the HLF-funded acquisition project ‘Beyond Documentary’ (2015-2018) explored the ways in which contemporary photographic practitioners, many of them women, have exploited the apparently neutral medium of photography to explore social issues and the urban environment.

  The dress and textile collection has grown in a similar way to other modern collections with many items added made by London ready-to-wear manufacturers and couture houses and designers. Contemporary collecting is actively pursued with recent projects undertaken including Muslim fashion (2014) and Punks (2016). An active collecting project was successfully completed around the London Olympics in 2012 which included costumes from the opening ceremony as well as the Olympic Cauldron designed by Thomas Heatherwick for which a special permanent gallery was created within the Museum.

  The Museum began to acquire born-digital material in 2012 when it collected c.6000 unique Tweets using the hashtag #citizencurators during the two weeks of the Olympic Games. This was an experimental collecting project which investigated the issues surrounding the collecting of social media. In 2015-16, a collecting project focused on video gaming and the video game industry in London.

  London as a centre of making and manufacture has long been a strength of the Museum’s collections, and this has recently led to a new focus on ‘maker culture’ in the city. The contemporary making collection is being developed with an aim to acquire objects which reflect the relationships between craft and design practice, and the cultural and economic life of modern London. Makers shape, and are shaped by, the global city, and the Museum aims to acquire objects which respond to its historical collections, and which are produced in circumstances (and by people) representing the diversity and complexity of London today.

  Access to the London Collection has increased through the creation of the collections online resource on the Museum’s web site. Currently, over 90,000 objects can be accessed online.

  Source: Collection development policy

  Date: Not known

  Licence: CC BY-NC

• Collection overview (Collection development policy)

  The term used to describe the collections of the Museum of London in their widest sense is ‘The London Collection’. This incorporates the Core Collections, the Support Collections and the Museum Business Archive. It is a collection of unrivalled breadth, covering the entire history of the history of the nation’s capital, and around a half a million years of human activity on the site. Its significance is recognised by its designated status as being of national and international importance. The London Collection reflects our standing as the world’s largest collection relating to a single urban centre and we currently hold almost 7 million items. Viewed as a whole, the London Collection provides a multi-faceted, three-dimensional, multi-media biography of the metropolis and the people who lived in this place for over 450,000 years. The Core Collection is described below.

  Core Collections

  Archaeological Archive: c. 6 million items

  The Museum’s archaeological collections, mostly held within the Archaeological Archive in Hackney, are not only by far the largest and most comprehensive body of urban archaeology in Britain, but also one of the most important repositories for urban studies in the world. The Archive holds contextually excavated archaeological material from sites across Greater London. It covers all periods of London’s urban history, as well as the prehistory of the region from the earliest evidence of human occupation half a million years ago. Among these extensive holdings are: the sole source of information on all aspects of the Roman built environment and context for non-excavated Roman collections in London and elsewhere; material excavated in and around Covent Garden and Aldwych, which constitutes the evidence for the existence of the Middle Saxon settlement of Lundenwic; unparalleled evidence of medieval domestic life and the structure of the medieval city; post-medieval material reflecting London’s role as the nation’s pre-eminent market, complemented by artefactual evidence reflecting London’s global trading networks.

  Human remains: over 20,000 individuals

  The human skeletal remains curated by the Centre for Human Bioarchaeology are a unique and internationally significant collection. London is the only capital in the world to be able to tell its history through the physical evidence of the people who inhabited it. Every skeleton has a unique ‘bone biography’ capturing different sets of life data as a person grows, lives and dies. This information is often the sole means of determining a person’s social and living conditions, their diet and nutrition, ancestry and status. The skeletal remains provide extraordinary data about individuals and population groups; and tangible evidence for the demographic structure of the capital and its region over half a million years.

  Historic Collections: over 124,000 items

  The collections of items covering the Lower Paleolithic period to the seventeenth century provide a complement to the archaeological collections. Flint and stone implements constitute the largest part of the prehistoric materials. The Museum holds material of international importance from sites such as Swanscombe, Yiewsley and Stoke Newington. The most important holdings within the prehistoric collection are the 900 pieces of Bronze Age and Iron Age metalwork, mostly recovered from the Thames. The Thomas Layton collection (on long term loan since the 1960s) includes a fine series of late Hallstatt/early La Tène daggers and two famous items of later Iron Age metalwork: a chariot fitting or ‘horn cap’ decorated in the Celtic art style, and a bronze-bound oak tankard.

  The Museum has by far the largest collection of Romano-British marble statuary in Britain. Of this, the London Mithraeum group, including representations of Mithras, Minerva, Serapis, and Mercury, is the finest example of Roman sculpture in the country. The samian ware holdings comprise the preeminent collection in Britain, while the leather holdings form an important resource for the study of Roman techniques, particularly shoe manufacture. The most famous leather items are the ‘bikini’ briefs which are the most complete examples known. Further holdings of glass, metal and the wide-ranging selection of domestic, industrial and religious artefacts combine to make this perhaps the best collection of Roman materials in Britain.

  The Saxon period is represented by important groups of items from the pagan Saxon cemeteries at Mitcham, Croydon, Hanwell and Ewell, along with Late Saxon and early Norman material from the City, including pottery, domestic items and jewellery. The single most important object of Late Saxon date in the collections, generally acknowledged as the finest Viking antiquity in the country, is the carved tomb-slab with runic inscription found near St Paul’s in 1852.

  The medieval period is one of the most celebrated elements of our overall holdings because of its breadth, depth and quality. It is strongest in ordinary domestic objects, particularly dress accessories, knives, tools and arms and armour. Pilgrim and secular badges and souvenirs constitute the most important group of their kind in Britain and one of the finest in Europe. The ceramics holdings are generally recognized as the best collection of medieval pottery in England, if not Europe.

  The early modern collections reflect the huge changes in London life and society during this time. Amongst the preeminent and significant holdings are edged weapons, scientific and mathematical instruments, London-made musical instruments, cloth and dyers’ seals, trade tokens, and glass and ceramics (including Rhenish stoneware and Delftware). The world-famous Cheapside Hoard is an internationally celebrated collection (almost 500 pieces). It a key source for our knowledge of Elizabethan and early Stuart jewellery and the largest hoard of its kind anywhere in the world.

  Modern collections: over c.100,000 items

  The period after the Great Fire is reflected in collections that document the experience of living in the metropolis for Londoners of all sections of society and cover an overwhelming range of themes: toys and games; life events; domestic material; furniture, fixtures and fittings; items relating to metropolitan infrastructure such as government, public utilities, welfare, housing, and education; material derived from service industries including retail, leisure, finance, and telecommunications. Significant events in the capital are represented, such as the Great Exhibition, the Blitz, the Festival of Britain, and the three London Olympic games. Of particular significance is the collection of Suffragette material including minute books, photographs and postcards, badges and scarves, and relics from hunger strikes. More recent political protest material includes items from Brian Haw’s peace camp set up in Parliament Square in 2001.

  The Museum holds workshop tools and machinery for seventy-five different crafts, manufacturing and processing trades; extensive groups of objects relating to London’s principal markets, notably Billingsgate, Spitalfields and Covent Garden; and unrivalled collections of material relating to London’s docks including river craft and cargo handling equipment ranging from dockers’ hooks to hydraulic jiggers. The ceramic collections of the 18^th to early 20^th century are outstanding, with nationally important material from London porcelain factories and art pottery made by Doulton, William de Morgan and the Martin brothers. The contemporary making collection seeks to build on these foundations, particularly in the areas of ceramics, furniture, metalwork and jewellery.

  Dress and Textiles: c. 23,000 items

  The Museum holds over 23,000 dress and textile items from the medieval period to the present day, which together with the earlier archaeological holdings of dress allow the fashions and tastes of the capital to be reconstructed throughout its history. The focus is on clothes and textiles made, promoted, bought and worn in London to represent the capital’s role in the design, production and consumption of garments and reflect the life of all of London’s communities. The collection ranges from garments sewn at home, made by dressmakers and tailors to those created by London-based couture houses and designers such as Lucile, Hardy Amies, Norman Hartnell, Victor Stiebel, Mary Quant, Katharine Hamnett, Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen. Clothing purchased in department stores, high street chains, boutiques, suburban outfitters and markets represent London’s varied retail outlets. As often as possible, clothing is acquired along with the oral testimony and evidence of those who owned and wore it. For example, in 2016, the Museum acquired a collection of clothing and accessories formerly owned by the architectural and planning consultant Francis Golding, in effect a ‘sartorial biography’, which was complemented by the acquisition of copies of some of his papers, letters and photographs.

  Art and Photography: c. 170,000 items

  The art collections comprise a visual encyclopaedia and record of London from the 16^th century to the present day. They include major works of art by leading artists alongside items of historic rather than artistic significance. Both reflect the importance of London both as a centre for art and a subject for artists and providing a reflection of London’s diverse physical and social fabric. The paintings, prints and drawings collection (c 20,000 items) is one of the largest in the United Kingdom and includes works by artists such as Canaletto, Paul Sandby, Henry Nelson O’Neil, Walter Sickert, David Bomberg and Henry Moore. The emphasis of the photographic collection (over 150,000 items) is primarily on topography and social documentary, and includes photographers such as Henry Fox Talbot, Roger Fenton, Christina Broom, Bill Brandt, Henry Grant, and Rut Blees Luxemburg.

  Printed ephemera, rare books, maps and manuscripts: over 100,000 items

  The Museum’s collection of printed and manuscript ephemera comprises around 75,000 items. It is arranged thematically, covering all aspects of London’s cultural, social and working history ranging from leisure and shopping through to political campaigning and crime. In effect, it is an archive of the city’s history as reflected in its documents and pamphlets. The collection includes both historic and contemporary material, ranging from miscellaneous accounts and deeds of the 15^th century to London’s current obsessions and pre-occupations from nail parlours to drug abuse. The Museum possesses two of the original plates for the Copperplate Map of c.1559, and the master version of the Booth Map of Poverty (1888-89), perhaps the most famous map of the entire 19th century. The Tangye Collection of Cromwelliana includes many rare books and manuscripts such as holograph letters of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell, and the only known copy of the Journal of Cromwell’s House of Lords from its inauguration to its last sitting (1657-59). Also of considerable significance are the King collections of toy theatre, tinsel prints and valentine’s cards, and the Kiralfy collection of material relating to the history of the White City exhibitions.

  Digital collections: c. 5000 hours of interviews

  The Museum has been collecting the life histories and memories of Londoners since the 1980s. The collection includes important groups of recordings including the Port and River Sound Archive and the London History Workshop collection. Interviews focus on interviewees’ working lives, labour relations, family life and childhood, community and social life, and the two world wars. Other recordings were made for The Peopling of London exhibition (1993-94) and London’s Voices project (2005-06) which resulted in 200 life story interviews with Londoners from many different communities and backgrounds.

  Recent collecting has included projects around the London 2012 Olympics, Punks and London Tattooists. In 2012, the Museum’s first Digital Collecting Framework was produced, reflecting our ambition to capture London’s ‘born-digital’ culture. To date this has ranged from Londoners’ social media reactions to events to a collecting project examining London in video games.

  Source: Collection development policy

  Date:

  Licence: CC BY-NC