Minefield
(Arrows in the Horniman Museum’s storage facility: London, UK)
Another stroke of good luck befell me yesterday when I spotted a note in London’s Time Out magazine – I called the Horniman Museum to enquire about a one time tour to their storage facility today. Amazingly they still had places and I was lucky to get one of the twelve that were on offer. The museum itself is one of these rare ones that grows out of one person’s obsessive collection, takes over their lives and then is left as a legacy to the public. These are some of my favourite museums* as their contents arrive from scattered continents, tied together by nothing more than their personal value to the collector. Mr Horniman must have been quite the Victorian eccentric – apparently his original collection caused his wife constant dismay as they lived in it, glass cases in the living room and all. The museum is random at best; a complex network of art, sculpture, textiles, ethnographical objects, taxidermy and in the basement it has a small but well stocked aquarium with frogs, fish and jellyfish! I’m sure Horniman would have approved of the new amendments to the educational hub he founded.
The tour took the entire afternoon as at 2pm we trundled off in a minivan from the museum in Forest Hill all the way through Greenwich to the storage building – a forty-minute journey across South London. Once there, we took in a vast array of sights, including this recently re-catalogued set of wooden arrows. As I recall, some of these beautiful carved items are from Polynesia, collected in the past century or so. This photograph is a close up of the labels attached to each object; the entire system is totally fascinating and unsurprisingly the staff are having to repack and catalogue each of the 300,000 (or so) items in order to log them on an online database. Anyway, the interesting bit was that there were entire rooms filled with say, stuffed birds or rolls of ancient textiles, skeletons and bits of bats, an antler collection, masses of musical instruments, tents, masks, costumes, instruments of torture, several Egyptian mummies… The place is a mine of generally amazing and horrifying global ephemera and hardly anyone has access to it. They mentioned that only 3% of what the museum owns is even on display. It’s incredible what a person can find if they read Time Out magazine on the correct day.
*For instance, John Soanes museum in London, the Bowes Museum in Northumbria, the Burrell Collection in Glasgow
– Today Rosie is dragging her six-week suitcase from ‘Stokey’ to Camden in London, UK –
