It has been an extremely busy weekend! I just got back from my stay with a host family in the British countryside and absolutely loved it… but that’s for a later post! I want to quickly touch on some things from last week – this is all about the museums I got the chance to visit!
I’m really trying to hit museums that aren’t necessarily on the tourist track but would still be interesting… and are free! Last Thursday I packed a lunch in my backpack and headed straight to an area that had 2 museums in walk-able distance from each other after class. The first one that I went to was called the Geffrye Museum; they market themselves as “The Museum of the Home.”
The building that the museum is housed in used to be owned by the wealthy Sir Robert Geffrye in the 1700s who basically turned it into almshouses for poorer people to live in. However, the Shoreditch location (Eastern London) became increasingly crowded and unsafe so the almshouses were relocated in the 1900s and the almshouses were converted into a museum. Having a space like this in Shoreditch is really rare, and there were lots of people sitting in this front part (like me eating my lunch) to read or just get away from the busy streets.
The premise of the museum is that it takes you through 400 years of what middle class homes in London looked like, in particular the parlor/sitting room/living room. Each room is from a different year and has a little bit written about it to give you a sense of what homes were like at this time, how they were decorated and how the living room was used specifically, and what family life might have been like. I am really fascinated by this stuff (if you haven’t caught on, I really enjoy exploring old homes whether they be castles or palaces or estates and it’s so interesting to see recreations of what this different historical rooms might have looked like) and while it was a pretty quick visit (45 minutes) I still learned a bit about why homes were the way they were and it was interesting to gradually see the evolution in technology and style.
They also have period gardens so you can see how gardens would have been styled during the different eras, but they were closed for the winter. I really enjoyed this one even if it was pretty short!
My next stop was the Museum of London, basically giving the complete history of London; how it came to be established and how it became the global city that it is today.
This was another really well done museum. It starts you out thousands of years ago learning about the geography of the land, very much shaped by the Thames. Next it walks you through Roman occupation of the area known as “Londinium.” From the windows of the museum, you can actually still see Roman walls that were built when this settlement was a part of the Roman empire. The local people were not very happy with Roman rule, in fact, they tried rebelling at least 3 times. But when the Roman empire finally fell, it took a lot of Londinium with it. This now sparse settlement was left to the rule of various invasions by the Normans, Saxons, and the Danes. Then suddenly around 1000-1100, things start coming together, and it becomes more than just a sparse settlement. Westminster Abbey is built, and English kings start building castles everywhere, including the Tower of London and Windsor Castle. Westminster Palace (now where Parliament is held) is also built due to its strategic location next to the Thames in order to really establish rule here and mark London as a place of power; it served as a main place of residence for kings in the late Middle Ages.
London continues to grow as a powerful place from this point, but things like the Black Death and the Great Fire of 1666 are big setbacks. There wasn’t as much information about the time period between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the peak of British imperialism, but I think that other museums and sites in London tend to fill in those gaps. There was a really nice Victorian section where they had actually recreated some Victorian street fronts with stores to walk into. Into the 20th century and onward, there seemed to be a lot more information again and it really focused on how London became such a popular place and eventually transitioned from an important city in the UK and Europe, to an important world city. The last bit of the museum had some interactive exhibitions examining the pitfalls of big cities (pollution, overcrowding, etc.) and how to face those as they continue to grow into bigger problems.
After going through the museum, it was interesting reflecting on how London came to be. It’s almost impossible to imagine it as anything other than a huge bustling place of great importance, but there was period of time in there where all different foreign invaders were in and out and it almost didn’t stand a chance at continuing to be a settlement – the only thing it really had going for it was the Thames. Interesting what a few castles and kings living in the city will do for it 
The last museum, the Gordon Museum, is actually from a couple weeks ago. And it’s also not actually open to the public. It’s a part of King’s College and our Health and Society class took a visit there. But it was so interesting! It’s a museum of pathology and is FILLED with all sorts of jarred pathogenic tissues from as early as the late 1600s and as late as last year! We weren’t allowed to take pictures inside because they’re “technically still live tissues” but I stole these off the internet
There are rooms and rooms just like this and sectioned by part of the body. There are also binders along the edges that tell you what’s wrong (in medical terms so I didn’t know really what they were saying) with the specific tissue. Most of them were different types of cancer – some of them looked pretty huge and terrible.
The museum also has a very nice wax model collection. There is a room devoted to wax models of skin diseases. The whole point of this museum is for teaching and studying so you can recognize pathology and see how it progresses; wax models work better for skin diseases than live tissues because bringing someone in with smallpox for example puts you and all other visiting patients at risk.
There is another room of wax models that show basic human anatomy and how different systems actually look combined in a human body instead of just by themselves like in a textbook. However, they were modeled off of real dissections that were done! The detail is absolutely incredible though.
The whole museum is honestly just kind of weird. But in a cool medical way. There were sections devoted to Hodgkin’s and Addison’s disease (since both of them were at King’s!) along with specimens. There was also a wall of old surgical and medical equipment. Some of the tools don’t look that different, but some of them look so scary – I don’t know how people could bear medical procedures and the lack of sterilized equipment actually lead to even more infection!
The weirdest thing in the museum to me though, was the mummy. From 2011. What? Apparentlyyyy some scientists wanted to study how bodies decay and use ancient Egyptian mummification practice on a person now. They put an advertisement in the newspaper (???) and a man with terminal lung disease accepted the offer! When he finally passed away, they began the long process of mummification; there was a poster on the wall that walked through the entire thing and there were steps that would take weeks at a time (soaking the body, drying out the body, etc.). I think what made it the most disconcerting was that they interviewed him before his death, and they play his interview right above the case that now holds his mummified body inside of it. I can think of no other words than weird and strange to describe this haha. But somehow the Gordon Museum got possession of it (how lucky for them haha) and now it’s just in there for everyone to see!
So, WEIRD! But in general the museum is just interesting from a medical perspective because of all the tissues, and the fact that they are 100% real! But all of the above things are why the museum is absolutely not open to the public haha.
There’s so much to see in London, and I’m slowly running out of time to do it all! Very sad, but I’m also thankful that I can have access to all of these things and constantly be learning new things!
Thanks for reading!!
-Katie
Katie, a senior Biology major, is spending the Fall 2017 semester studying Health & Society at King's College in London through Arcadia University.
Read more from Katie at https://katientheuk.wordpress.com/
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