Go London-Hunting in the V&A
The old bits of London lurking in the museum.
Welcome to the Friday edition of Londonist: Time Machine for paying subscribers, with a chunky teaser for everyone else.
The V&A East Storehouse just opened in Hackney Wick. It sounds a bit special. I’ve not had chance to look around yet, but I have instead been back to the original museum, in my never-ending quest to find bits of old London.
That’s for the main section. First, the History Radar of upcoming events.
History Radar
Upcoming events of interest to London history fans.
🌳 GARDENS: This weekend (7-8 June) is London Open Gardens weekend, when over 100 of the capitals green spaces open their gates to the public. Many of these are in historic locations, such as Charterhouse and Marlborough House, and most cannot normally be visited. Do have a look at the programme, and perhaps see you around (I’m touring a few on Sunday).
✍️ FREE DICKENS: To celebrate its 100th birthday, the Charles Dickens Museum offers free entry for one day only on 9 June — the anniversary of the author's death. Even better, members of his own family are playing the role of museum stewards for the day, including Lucinda Hawksley (his great-great-great-granddaughter) who gives a talk about Dickens' international travels.
📸 REBEL ARCHIVISTS: On 11 June, Barbican hosts a panel talk exploring how photography, music, and storytelling help preserve London’s cultural history and keep community voices alive for future generations, and what happens to those histories when certain scenes or demographics are marginalised. The panel includes author and music journalist Aniefiok Ekpoudom, and Dr Aleema Gray, curator of 2024 exhibition Beyond The Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music.
💂🏽♀️ KING'S BIRTHDAY PARADE: Trooping the Colour, AKA the King's Birthday Parade, takes place at Horseguards Parade on 14 June. At time of writing, there are very few tickets left, otherwise, you might catch a free glimpse if you get to The Mall or St James's Park early enough to get a good spot (or it'll be shown on BBC if you can't face the crowds). Later, at 1pm, a military flypast by the RAF whooshes over The Mall.
🇪🇸 THE SPANISH KEATS: On 15 June, Keats House in Hampstead celebrates the little-known Spanish connections to the poet John Keats. Discover the life of Fanny Keats, who married Spanish writer Valentín Llanos, shedding light on how this relationship influenced Keats's legacy. Admission to Keats House is included with your ticket.
🚶🏾♀️TOUR GUIDES: I’ve got infinite respect for tour guides… they’re always such knowledgeable, enthusiastic people. But guiding takes a lot of skill, which goes way beyond learning the local history. So I want to flag up an initiative that could do with a bit of support. Over the past 15 years, Unseen Tours has trained 29 people with experience of homelessness to become award-winning tour guides. They’ve now welcomed over 30,000 people onto tours. Their approach combines local history with powerful personal stories, challenging stigma and offering a meaningful income to people rebuilding their lives. But they need help. Unseen Tours is looking to raise £25,000 to help with training, growing the number of tours, and improving perceptions of homelessness. Take a look at their appeal, and see if you can help this wonderful cause.
Go London-Hunting in the V&A
The Victoria and Albert (V&A) museum in South Kensington is gloriously overwhelming. I’ve been at least a couple-dozen times and always find a new room. Occasionally I find a new wing. The room numbers go up to 146, which is a lot.
There are many ways to tackle this Borgesian labyrinth of art and design. Most visitors simply wander; follow their noses. Others will beeline towards the acknowledged highlights, like the Cast Courts and the ornamental cafe. But another, perhaps more rewarding way to explore is to pick a theme and seek out objects that fit. That’s what we’re going to do today. And you won’t be surprised to learn that the category is ‘London history’.
The V&A has its origins in the Great Exhibition of 1851, a tremendous display of industry, design and manufacturing, all housed inside the Crystal Palace. The profits were channelled into new developments in South Kensington, including the cluster of museums. The V&A is most like its parent, a treasure house of art and design from every corner of the world. Mixed in among it all is a wealth of material relating to London and its past. Here’s how to track it down:
1. London interiors
Britain Galleries, various rooms
Some of the V&A’s exhibits are so large that you can step inside, thereby reversing the natural order of things where, normally, you’d be looking into a cabinet from the outside. The Britain Galleries include several examples, including a sequence of rooms rescued from London’s grand houses. The largest is the white-and-gold panelled music room from Norfolk House (above). This London home of the Dukes of Norfolk stood in St James’s Square from the mid-18th century and was demolished in 1938. The space is so opulent and gilded that you half expect Lara Croft to smash through the mirror.
Elsewhere, you can saunter into a panelled room from 1606, rescued from a house in Bromley-by-Bow; and admire a a withdrawn withdrawing room of 1727 from a house on Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. This section also contains an interior wall from Northumberland House, the lion-topped pile that fronted Trafalgar Square, where Northumberland Avenue now stands.
2. A different John Rocque map
Britain Galleries (room 54)
Regular readers will know all about my project to gradually colour in John Rocque’s 1746 map of London. The great cartographer’s corpus is much deeper than that one map, however. The V&A displays one of his earliest known works, a chart of the gardens at Chiswick House, west London from 1736. I’d elaborate further, but I’m getting the urge to stop typing and colour it in… so let’s move on.
3. Spitalfields silk weavers
Britain galleries (room 52b)
These exquisite shoes are made of brocaded silk, woven long ago in the attics of Spitalfields. The area, famously, was populated by Huguenot refugees, who had fled from religious persecution in Catholic France. They brought with them expertise in weaving, and built a thriving industry from the terrace houses of Spitalfields.
Now, I’m no expert in mid-18th century women’s footwear, but even I can tell that these delicate shoes were not intended for hiking across the moors. These were status symbols, worn indoors by fashionable ladies, never to trouble the dung-stained pavements of Georgian London. The display contains other examples of Spitalfields silk weaving, including samples from Anna Maria Garthwaite, the most famous designer of flowered silks.
4. The Great Exhibition
Britain Galleries (Room 122)
As I said up top, the V&A sprang from the cast-iron loins of the Great Exhibition, and so it is no surprise to find traces of the parent dotted around the museum. The greatest collection is in the upper floor of the Britain Galleries, where a whole room is devoted to objects from the exhibition. The greatest treasure of all is architect Joseph Paxton’s original sketch for the Crystal Palace, the world-beating greenhouse that enveloped the show. Paxton worked out the structure on the back of a telegraph sheet — the original ‘back of an envelope calculation’.
5. Charlie Chaplin’s hat and cane
Theatre and Performance (Room 106)
The museum’s Theatre and Film galleries, I suspect, are often missed by casual visitors. They’re hidden away upstairs towards the back of the building, and they’re fab. The collection was brought here in the Noughties following the closure of the V&A’s spin-off Theatre Museum in Covent Garden, and a poster from that lost venue is among the exhibits here.
I’m drawn immediately, though, to the iconic hat and cane of Charlie Chaplin. The clown prince no doubt got through dozens of these props over the years, though it’s still a bit special to find some on show. The genuine articles are displayed alongside the costume worn by Robert Downey Jr for the 1992 film Chaplin. Elsewhere in these eclectic galleries, you’ll find a silk programme from the 2239th performance of The Mousetrap (the evening when it broke the record for longest-running West End show), as well as costumes from Peaky Blinders, His Dark Materials and Olivier’s Hamlet.
6. Sir Paul Pindar’s House
Medieval and Renaissance (Room 64b)
Until the early 20th century, Bishopsgate still boasted a number of ancient facades that had survived the Great Fire of 1666. The Victorians and Edwardians tore them down in the name of progress. Not all was lost, however. Crosby Hall, a former home of Thomas More, was disassembled and rebuilt on the Chelsea riverfront where it stands to this day. Another survivor is this thrusting facade to Paul Pindar’s house. Pindar was a super-wealthy merchant who, among other things, donated £10,000 towards improvements to St Paul’s Cathedral (soon to be wiped out by the fire). His house would last much longer, finally succumbing to demolition in 1890, for an expansion of Liverpool Street station. The frontage was recognised as ‘a bit special’ and saved for posterity at the V&A.
7. Pugin exhibition
Julie and Robert Breckman Gallery (Rooms 88A and 90)
A temporary opening within the museum (until 26 October 2025) is this generous display devoted to AWN Pugin. Best noted for his elaborate architectural features in the Palace of Westminster (including the clock tower commonly called ‘Big Ben’), Pugin worked on many other keynote buildings over his relatively short career. These two rooms display some of his baroque notebooks, architectural drawings and items such as these majolica-glazed tiles from his great stove for the Great Exhibition. Pugin is not exactly a forgotten genius, but nor is he the household name he deserves to be. Indeed, my spellcheck keeps changing his name to Putin, which makes me wonder if I should get my laptop examined.
8. Architectural models
Architecture (Room 128)
Hidden away on the third floor is a relatively small room devoted to architecture. It includes a trove of drawings, photographs and architectural models relating to London. My favourite is the cutaway of the British Museum’s Reading Room, designed in 1853 by Sydney Smirke and Alfred Stevens. But you’ll also find a Victorian building for Whitehall, a model of the old Coal Exchange from Thames Street, demolished in the 1960s, an office block from Canary Wharf and various other structures.
9. Gold-beaters arm
Silver gallery (Room 68)
This old shop sign might be familiar. A more famous example protruded from the rear of Foyles, before the bookshop decamped a few doors down to allow for redevelopment. That pastiche gold-beater’s arm was inspired by a description in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, and was positioned on Manette Street, named after a character from that novel. Other examples could once be found across London. This one, from around 1800, comes from George Whiley’s shop on Whitfield Street, in what is now Fitzrovia. (The closet psychogeographer might equate it with Thor’s hammer, and then make a connection to the bolt of lightning that killed a man in the adjacent Whitfield’s Chapel, which I described in last Friday’s newsletter.)
And on that note, let’s draw things to a close. Of course, there’s much else with a London connection to see in the museum, from Cardinal Wolsey’s unused tomb angels to an unsuccessful competition entry for a memorial to the Great Exhibition. But this newsletter has ran its course. Please do suggest further examples in the comments, or email me anytime on matt@londonist.com. And let me know if you like this format, and I’ll pull out similar ‘London discoveries’ from the Science Museum, British Museum and other large venues.
Great to have a route mapped out to explore London in the V&A - will certainly follow in your footsteps!!
Great article Matt, it's such a great museum, the upper floors especially are a really treasure trove.