The Museum of Brands, Packaging & Advertising.

Colville Mews

Lonsdale Road

Notting Hill London W112 AR

Wednesday September 10 2014

I have always been a fan of packaging, indeed you could go as far as saying ‘a sucker for packaging‘ where cosmetics are concerned, so this was not a difficult choice this week. As it happens Jo and I had both been to the original museum back in the 1980s when it was still on the Gloucester dockside and a good place to lose a wet afternoon whilst on holiday in the nearby Forest of Dean. After nearly 20 years in Gloucester the collection transferred to its current site in a quiet mews in north Notting Hill, at one time the less wealthy end though the presence of high end fashion showrooms next door shows this area has seen changes. Totting up all those figures will tell you that Robert Opie, its founder, has been collecting packaging for nearly fifty years. We met at busy Notting Hill Gate having both arrived by underground; the 15+ minute walk  takes you along  the very attractive Pembridge Road and Crescent; the bus numbers 23 and 31 will take you closer.  

As photography is not allowed this account would look rather plain so I made a decision on reaching home to look out some of the brands that were on display from our own store-cupboards and photograph these. This underlines the fact that the Museum only has UK brands (though some are of course now owned by multi-nationals) and unlike last week’s visit would not appeal to many overseas visitors. These are quintessentially the items homesick Brits/ex-pats request when living overseas. I have to confess that my store cupboards had far more overseas items than home grown… and I suspect that it is the case for many of us today. Also the packaging is today’s and not historical, though some of the display’s charm lies in seeing how little things have changed and of course many modern designers do like that retro feel.

Apart from the special, additional World War 1 cabinet at the start, the museum is arranged chronologically. After the Victorian and Edwardian sections there are areas for each decade.  The signage summarises the key political and social developments during that 10 year period plus any significant inventions or events to give a context. The cases are then arranged by products – ie biscuits / chocolates / soap / marmalade / Gentlemen’s Relish (‘Patum Peperium’) with separate cases looking at any of the contemporary celebrations starting with the Jubilee of Queen Victoria and following through to the 2012 Jubilee and Olympics. Exhibitions, sporting events, and royal  occasions various (but weddings especially) all inspire special editions of well-known brands with their products packaged in celebratory mode.  There are also cases for each decade with the most iconic and popular toys and games from that decade.  The World War 1 games are both patriotic and competitive, eg. ‘Race to Berlin’ and ‘With the Flag to Berlin’ are board games while ‘Pop into Potsdam’ is one of those hand-held ball-through-the-maze toys. By the Seventies and Eighties we are looking at Barbie Dolls and Star Wars figures, the point at which global marketing became what drove and drives the toy industry. Toys also link in with TV programmes, and increasingly films made for children.

The brands and their packaging are presented but not critically evaluated – what makes a brand a brand: is it the content? – tea-bags / soap powder / soft drinks and above all cigarettes – or is it the ‘image’ it sells also? Brands need to be instantly recognisable for the shopper who just grabs a tin or packet when in a hurry…  I know when I enter the cereal aisles that Shreddies are the almost only blue package on view, so I go on buying them.  Hence the success of Dorset cereals whose ‘see through‘ window packaging was immensely popular  and helped them secure  a part of the market.    

The Museum of course records those brands that are no longer …. Venus Soap, or Keating's Powder which is perhaps no longer needed as ‘it kills off fleas and lice’, they even had a  jingle  for this now hopefully redundant product.  There areinnumerable kinds of beef extract as given to ailing Victorian heroines.  Patriotic adverts for Bovril and Oxo are particularly prevalent   Occasionally a ‘celebrity’ is pulled in to help boost a product, for example WG Grace the cricketer – now reduced to a fridge magnet  promoting mustard.

New inventions of course generate new brands. I had thought the freeze drying and dehydrating of goods for later rehydration was a fairly new way of presenting food but it seems to have been used since Edwardian days at least.  Eating at the front or on manoeuvres have a longer legacy than just feeding the troops – and ‘instant coffee’ really took off after World War II as meat extract drinks faded from the scene.

Sweets and biscuits have strong brand identities even if the number of biscuit firms has declined as companies combine and take each other over.

The Twenties  was a decade that saw the introduction of several favourite brands, among them some of our best loved chocolate bars.  

Mackintoshes ‘Quality Street’ toffees have virtually the same font and the same tins they have always had – after the series of cases devoted to each decade come shelves of virtually unchanged packaging which include the following products:

Johnson’s Baby items

Imperial  Leather Soap

Scholls Foot Products

Roses Chocolates

Bovril

Optrex

Dettol

Ovaltine

Bird’s Custard

Tate & Lyle Golden Syrup

HP Sauce (still a mystery as to what the HP stands for ??

Interestingly some packaging has become ‘intellectual property’ so only Cadbury’s can package in purple (while Suchard Milka has mauve) certain jar shapes are limited to Nescafe, and you may remember the JIF  lemon squeezer, which some used as a water pistol .....

Of course after tins and paper packaging – the latter so ephemeral the advent of plastic changed packaging radically in the second half of the 20^th century. There were other innovations – light crushable aluminium with ring-pulls for cans, wine boxes, and tetra packs for some liquids.

Cellophane makes a brief appearance – there is no acknowledgement that in the quest for hygiene, sell by dates and keeping qualities some products are very difficult to open.  One case is devoted to the sustainability of packaging – only certain wood pulps re-cycle and of course packaging forms a large part of our litter problems:  you can sometimes gauge the popularity of a brand by the number of wrappers in the gutter…  Some packets are hard to retrieve so it is surprising there are any crisp packets on display  at all. A great find for the museum was a houseful of goods dating from the late Seventies and early Eighties left untouched for thirty years. Dotted amongst the toys and packets are the odd promotional toy or mug.

Rather under represented – perhaps because most of the key products are French or American – are the cosmetics and beauty products (or maybe because the collector is a man?) where the packaging is almost as important as the product – pretty jars and boxes are needed   for your bathroom and certainly influence this consumer.

The entire collection  is a very visual experience – advertising takes many forms and  the museum focuses on the visible and  tangible; there are some old reels of TV adverts and you can hear the odd jingle towards the end of the  display cases, or when you stop for a drink in the modest café.  It is also a very nostalgic experience – as Time Out put it (quoted on the promotional  brochure):

‘to walk through the magnificently cluttered time tunnel of cartons and bottles toys and advertising displays is to locate your own place in history.’

It is no surprise that old adverts etc are such a key element in any reminiscence work with the elderly. 

PS In case anyone was wondering they are Mr and Mrs. Ribena Berry (aka a pencil sharpener and pen holder).

PPS TFL have finally come good after a certain amount of agitation and replied to my complaint from June... 

2 Temple Place

Monday 8 September 2014

On this beautiful sunny day, Andrew and I went on a private tour of 2 Temple Place, organised by the Friends of the British Library. I thought Linda and Mary would not mind if I wrote it up, though we shall of course visit it when there is an exhibition on and access is more straightforward.  They have exhibitions between January and March each year, and the next one will be 'Hidden Collections of the Industrial North West'.

So we arrived in the calm front courtyard of this remarkable building, though the traffic noise from Temple Place and the Strand was intrusive, and were met by our guide, Nigel Black, who began by telling us about the original owner of the building, and pointing out some key features.  The money came from William Waldorf Astor, for whom the word 'rich' is an understatement, but the inspiration was his architect, John Loughborough Pearson. For this building, Pearson moved from his usual Neo-Gothic to what the guide aptly called Neo-Tudor.  The outside embellishments include lamps with 15th century ships on them.  The weathervane, just visible above the crenellated roof, is of Columbus' 1492 ship, the Santa Maria.  Columbus, after all, went the 'other way' from Aster, Europe to America.

Since these were to be the offices of the Astor business empire, and therefore modern, the cherubs on one lamp stand are telephoning one another.  (The other lamp stand has one winding a coil while the other holds up a light bulb).

If I say that his home in London was in Carlton House Terrace (up for sale last year for £250,000,000) and his country houses were Cliveden and Hever Castle, you will see what I mean about his being rich.

But we were here to see William Waldorf's offices.  Having inherited his father's fortune, and wisely continued the family habit of investing in real estate in New York, he moved to England in 1890. He was always worried about his personal security, and the USA was a land of kidnappings and gangsters. So in we went, to the wood panelled entrance hall. It has a striking stone floor, onyx, chalcedony, porphyry and jasper inlaid in the marble.

Astor was very fond of historical fiction, and so the hall and staircase are embellished with wooden carvings of characters from his favourites. The ground floor has the Three Musketeers, plus d'Artagnan,  Milady, and various others.  Then on the upstairs landing, we have Hawkeye and Uncas from James Fenimore Cooper, two characters from Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and Rip van Winkle and his daughter to illustrate Washington Irving.  Above them all, for British literature, are friezes of Shakespeare plays.  These are by Thomas Nicholls, taking a break from church embellishment which was his main focus.  (You can see some more of his work in Waltham Abbey).  Above all this wood is a stained glass ceiling dating from 1895.

Next we moved into the Library, which was book-free, having in fact been Astor's office. (He had bought the Pall Mall Gazette, turning it from a Liberal paper to a Conservative one, though it made him no money and his wealth continued to come from New York)  The Library is embellished with lots more cherubs, by William Frith who also made the entrance lamp stands.  They depict the Arts and the Sciences, one of them holding a retort, and a couple of others with musical instruments and books
Above, are fifty heads of historical and literary figures by Nathaniel Hitch.  Here Bismarck and Martin Luther mix with the Lady of Shallot and others.  And then there are characters from Ivanhoe...
At either end of the room are stained glass windows by Clayton and Bell, depicting a Swiss sunrise and sunset.  When one end of the building was damaged by a nearby V1 in 1944, the glass was safely is storage, and survived.

Oh, yes, because you can never have too much, there is also a fine door carved by George Frampton, the man who 'did' Edith Cavell and Peter Pan. It shows nine women from the Arthurian legends.

Then we went through a 'hidden door' (part of Astor's security worries) into an exhibition room, still sporting the wallpaper from a William Morris exhibition, and our tour finished.

We had learned a lot of Astor family history, which I shall not detail here. Astors entered British Tory politics and embedded themselves in the establishment.  An Astor won gold at the 1908 Olympics (for Racquets, that upper class and now abandoned Olympic sport); one small descendant was bridesmaid to Katherine Middleton;  one is stepfather to the Prime Minister's wife.

We also learned about the owners of the building since Astor:  Sunlife Assurance of Canada, followed by the Accountants and Auditors/Chartered Accountants, who used it as a sort of Livery Hall.  But now it belongs to the Bulldog Trust, a charity which helps other charities with their governance, and by giving 'modest grants' (Nigel Blacks words, not mine!)

It had been a fascinating tour, and one which I would recommend to anyone, especially anyone with an interest in late 19th century decorative arts .... or an interest in how rich Americans like to spend their money.

Benjamin Franklin House

36 Craven Street

London WC2N 5NF

Monday  September 1^st 2014

As it was raining after the Banqueting Hall we scuttled along to Trafalgar Square, taking shelter in the arcade by the bookshops and found Craven Street surprisingly quiet given its location just off the Strand. There are some small old pubs tucked into the alleys but otherwise the street presents an almost unbroken terrace of Georgian town houses that run down to the Embankment.  We have a Mr Craven, an 18^th century architect / developer to thank for ‘gentrifying’ the street from its former incarnation of disreputable houses; he also literally raised the level of the street thus allowing for some ‘below stairs’ working and storage space – an area to keep the coal for example.

The  house numbers have changed over the years and  what was previously Number 7 is now Number 36, and as we approached a notice was flapping soggily on the door – ‘it’s shut’ we thought but ringing the bell brought one of the two house volunteers to invite us in and book us onto a 12.00 ‘architectural tour’. The website explains the different options but essentially you cannot explore the house unaccompanied and in fact it would not make much sense if you did. Much more popular than our kind of tour are the ‘Historical experiences’ which include actors and projections bringing Franklin’s words to life. As expected this attraction is very popular with Americans for whom Benjamin Franklin is not only a founding father but a great American hero – not for his deeds but his ideas.   

As anyone who has been to the US, and especially to the East Coast, will know the Americans love to populate their historic sites (or even recreate them in the case of Williamsburg) with appropriately costumed and sometimes appropriately speaking actors either to portray tradespeople of the time or more famous residents. We gathered that the ‘story’ for the Benjamin Franklin House is told from the point of view of Polly Stevenson, the daughter of the landlady, a widow who maintained her family by letting rooms. 

The tour begins in what we would call the basement, where are displayed a variety of objects found on different excavations. Prior to the Stevensons the former owner / tenant had been Hewson, a surgeon, who clearly, from the number of bones exhumed, practised on already dead corpses. He worked with the more famous Hunter.  The display cases for the objects and the time-lines, like the shop are in a somewhat clumsy extension built out the back.   

Back to Ben Franklin who arrived in England initially for 5 months, and stayed for 14 years, all of them in this house. Already  the Postmaster General  in the American states (still a colony) Benjamin  Franklin  was  sent over to smooth relations between the ‘old and new countries’ though I think we all know how that story ended. The basement rooms  are assumed to be where any cooking took place (though my suspicion is that much eating would have happened in chop houses and taverns of which there has never been a shortage in this part of London) so there is a later range . More interestingly there is also a cupboard in the wall, well off the floor, which is not typical of Georgian houses, and is thought to have been a proto-fridge or larder – on the cool wall of course. There are windows but well below street level.

The next, ground floor was the Stevensons’ domain and gave our guide, Samantha, a chance to tell us about their ‘relationship’ with Mr Franklin. ‘Reader – she married him.’ Well, no she didn’t, as he actually married neither long-term partner and mother of his children Deborah Read, who chose to stay ‘home’ in New England, nor Margaret Stevenson, his surrogate English ‘wife’.  He was clearly very fond of young Polly too and she  followed him back to America in time for the war of Independence.  The wood panelled room of modest but very regular proportions is ‘set up’ with a tea-tray which would have been very much the female’s domain  see entry for Twinings Tea Museum ).

The first floor (second to Americans who name their floors differently) was where Benjamin Franklin set up home – and it is the most handsome room with floor to ceiling windows and a small false but decorative balcony. Apparently the illustrious tenant was a great believer in the benefits of ‘fresh air’ and followed his own theory by having a bath and then standing naked by the open window. This was not a particularly good image and the ‘air bath’ has not gone down as one of his more successful inventions or experiments. He was clearly made of tough stuff as he also used to swim (having taught himself from a book no less) in the Thames, even more of a sewer then.  Originally the front and back rooms were only divided by some columns which a later tenant removed, replacing them with a wall which proved to be less weight bearing than he thought. These alterations led to the upper floors sagging and distorting (I believe ‘architectural relaxing’ might be a kinder way of describing it) which is certainly noticeable as you go higher in the house.

The second floor (OK – I give up) has a display with a copy of Franklin’s glass harmonica (the original is in Philadelphia) of which we were given a demonstration. Apparently when out in the Irish drinking communities Franklin noticed how they played tunes on differently filled glasses by rubbing the rims, and sure enough the harmonica consists of a graded series of glass vessels. Mozart even composed some music for this rather ephemeral instrument – it never really caught on and once you’re not part of an orchestra you can easily fail…

This guy  makes a really good job of it – all we could manage was a sound sort of like a noise that might have escaped from Dr.Who.

The tour finishes here – the servants of course would have been on the smallest, least glamorous and most inaccessible topmost floor. Apparently Franklin arrived with two slaves whom he freed on arrival; one took off into the bright lights of London whereas Peter stayed with ‘his master’.

For Americans this tour must be an absolute delight – it is the only home where Franklin lived still to be standing and they are much more familiar with the various stories of his inventions and experiments.    For other visitors it is a good introduction to a fascinating man and an excellent opportunity to see a more modest London Georgian town house largely unaltered since its building in 1830.

PS Due to low level lighting and extensive wooden panelling  photos of poor quality...

The Banqueting House

Monday 1September 2014

Whitehall, SW1A 2ER

Linda and I arrived in Whitehall in good time for the 10.00am opening of this treasure of the Royal Historic Palaces' collection.  It was not quite raining, but even so, we should have been glad had the place opened on time, rather than five minutes late.  Still, this did give me a chance to discuss with an armed police officer why there were no signs telling me I could not lock my bicycle anywhere hereabouts.  I pointed out that not all cyclists knew the area, and that if there are to be police-state restrictions, they should at least be signalled.  He seemed bemused....


So, at 10.05 the gates were unbarred and we entered, pausing briefly in the Undercroft, now mainly a cafe, to use the facilities, which were very smart.


We had accepted the free audio guides, and so were listening as we went upstairs to the Banqueting House itself.  The main problem is this:  there is just one room to look at.  It is a sumptuous room, with a frankly astounding Rubens ceiling, but it is still one room, so the audio guide has amazing amounts of background information of an educational nature.  We were told, for instance, the difference between Ionic and Corinthian columns (both on display here) as well as much history of the buildings which were here before this one.

All this on top of a useful video show, starting with The Archbishop of York, whose property this land had once been.  (The video says 'Wolsey', but the land actually belonged to the archdiocese before Henry VIII took it and used it to build his Whitehall Palace).

After an number of the fires so customary in Tudor times, and after the accession of James I, the ramshackle tilt yards, cockpits and tennis courts were pulled down, and the most fashionable architect of the day, Inigo Jones designed the building we have today. He had just returned from Italy, and clearly kept a book mark in his copy of Palladio's great work while he designed the Banqueting House.

The audio guide had a lot to say about Masques, banquets, entertaining foreign ambassadors and so on.  But once Charles I had the ceiling put in, masques stopped, as the innumerable torches and candles would have damaged the ceiling paintings.

And the paintings are gobsmacking; nine enormous canvases, brought by ship from the studios and workshops of Peter Paul Rubens, in response to a 1639 commission from Charles I.  He paid £3000 for it, which according to an inflation calculation website is something like half a million pounds now.

The audio guide told us all about how they were rolled, shipped and lifted into place, but it is more useful to use the beanbags to lie on, or the angled mirror trollies to have a really good look at them.  In the centre, James I is being welcomed into heaven by a clutch of putti and classical goddesses.  Then there are various classical scenes, including one likening James to Solomon.  All in all, the ceiling is a statement about the Divine Right of KIngs, which was Charles I's overarching belief. 'Even by God himself', claimed Charles, 'Kings are called Gods', though I have been unable to trace his particular reference for this claim.  This was the Hall where the later Stuart kings handed out the Maundy money, and also touched people to cure them of the King's Evil.

Which brings me neatly to the most important date in the history of this fine building:  30 January 1649, when the King, Charles I, stepped out of a window onto the scaffold and was beheaded.  I suppose it's not surprising that the Historic Royal Palaces underplay this moment.  They talk about his walk from St James' Palace that morning, wearing two shirts in case people thought his shivering was fear. The video says he was 'accused of treason'. But there is no mention of his negotiations with France and his alliance with the Scots (when he promised to make England Presbyterian when he got his throne back...) both of which actually ARE treason unless one is a Divine Right believer.  Still, he died, and the Parliamentarian republic continued to use the Hall as a formal reception venue, presumably dissuading people from looking up at the ceiling.


Of course, when Charles stepped onto the scaffold, Whitehall looked rather different from the view he would have had today.

In 1698, fire swept through Whitehall Palace, the Banqueting House being the only survivor, possibly because Christopher Wren used gunpowder to prevent the spread, as had been done in the 1666 fire in the City.  

The Banqueting House has the now-obligatory rack of dressing up clothes for children, but there were none while we were there.  In fact I think there were about 10 of us altogether in the time we were there.

As you can tell from the wealth of facts I have passed on above, HRP clearly feels the place needs lots of information to compensate for the fact the your £6.00 does not buy you much to look at, aside from the ceiling.  But still, worth a visit.

The Jewish Museum

Raymond Burton House
129-131 Albert Street
London NW1 7NB

Tuesday August 11 2014

In a slightly counter-intuitive move and because the venue and timing suited those of us with other commitments we opted to visit London's Jewish Museum located in a beautiful 19^th Century terrace on the surprisingly quiet Albert Street , which is just off parkway in Camden - Mary and I arrived via the Northern Line at Camden alongside the hordes heading for the markets, while Jo bicycled. The Museum does not have dedicated bicycle racks so she had to make do with a piece of street furniture. 

Once inside the building you lose sight of the 19^th century facade. The Museum moved here in 1994 but was only opened in this much more spacious format in 2010 – a disused piano factory had given the Museum space to expand and on our visit today we really only covered two floors.  There is a plan to move the Jewish Military Museum here quite soon and there is also space for special exhibitions, usually on the ground floor where there are also toilets a café and shop, and one of their prize exhibits a ritual bath (Mikva) rescued from Milk Street. The cloakroom happily takes bags. 

Mary opted to start with the 2^nd floor, which is a more intimate space devoted to the religion of Judaism. She also attracted the attention of one of the several volunteer room guides who was keen to enlighten her about the detail of Jewish beliefs and rituals. I was left largely to my own devices either because I was making notes or they assumed I must know some of it…only partly true. Talking of enlightenment, the centre pieces of this space are a range of beautiful specifically religious light fittings from round the world. We were very impressed with the labelling and displays within the museum, there seemed to be an ideal balance between artefacts/context and robust inter-active explanations and enhancements.  For instance there are short videos of young Jews explaining the various customs pertaining the celebrations and rituals of birth, marriage, death etc. Walking seven times round the groom – symbolic for the journeys to make a home. Stamping on the glass – to remember that there are difficult times as well as happy during a marriage and to remember the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem. There are significant amounts of polished silver for candelabra and the handles which hold the holy scrolls – the Torah. More unusually there was a swaddling cloth to hold the male infant’s legs during circumcision – at which point Mary got into a discussion with one of the museum volunteers, who it seemed was a retired doctor… there was also an example of an elaborately calligraphed Ketubah, otherwise known as a ‘pre-nup’. Another grand exhibit is the upright chest, beautifully decorated walnut wood, made to hold the scrolls and found  in 1932 being used as a boot cupboard – probably bought in Italy by some well -heeled Englishman doing the ‘Grand Tour’.

Touring and moving on is of course key to the Jews’ story and it is no different for those in UK; the Jewish arrivals from the time of William the Conqueror in 1066 are where England’s particular time-line begins. They came as the money (lending) men behind the invaders and stayed to be merchants, settling undisturbed for some 200 years. First expulsions came during the reign of Edward I and he also introduced the system of ‘badge-wearing’ shaped like the 2 tablets rather than a star of David.    And expelled they stayed except for a few who perhaps ‘hid’ their religion as nicely represented by a single candle burning in a window.  You can listen to Anthony Sher talking about Shakespeare’s representations of Jews and his own experiences growing up in South Africa.

Oliver Cromwell, who had some tolerance for minority religions (and needed some independent cash backers) allowed the Jews back in and again they settled in our larger cities. Walk through Lincoln for example and you will find the corner named as ‘Old Jewry’. Once the Jewish community became well established in the UK there a range of artefacts showing Jews following a range of occupations form peddler to politician (there are some who might think these two sides of the same coin – peddling trifles or peddling lies?) of whom Montefiore and of course Disraeli were the most famous. A large section is devoted to memories from the old East End – the Jews like refugees/arrivals/immigrants before and after them settled in the streets round Whitechapel and the Commercial Road. This theme – life, work and play in the East End – is handled really well, which is not surprising as the Museum was originally founded to preserve evidence of this way of life before the buildings, fittings and folk disappeared. You can hear ‘testament’ from different generations of the Jews who formed part of the mass migrations from Eastern Europe bringing with them their skills, foods and Yiddish language – a mixture of largely old German, Slavic and Hebrew. Tailoring is looked at in some detail as is membership of trade unions, and indeed political parties. 

Like all ‘arrivals’ they were greeted with suspicion and fear – an excellent display shows a range of ‘press cuttings’ over several centuries pointing out the ‘perceived threats’ posed by the incomers showing how little ignorant  public opinion has changed over the years.

The role of Jewish  servicemen  during both world wars is covered briefly (we had missed the special WW1 exhibition which rather to our surprise had already been taken down) and this aspect of Jewish History will undoubtedly be covered in more detail when the Military Museum moves here at a later stage. Highlighted is the poet Isaac Rosenberg, killed in France in 1915, and a serving sailor. 

Probably less well known is the sizeable contribution Jewish fighters made during the Spanish Civil war, and on home ground to the Union movement generously  illustrated by a range of exhibits. The years between the two wars saw the rise of Zionism and the campaign for a safe haven for Jews in the Palestine, while Europe saw the growth of the right wing anti-semitism that would eventually become the destructive Nazi regime leading to the most infamous episode in Jewish history; both the stories of those who survived the camps and Holocaust and those who were able to flee are told through moving testament. Never an easy listen or visit but an essential part, and here a very proportionate part of the Jewish history in the UK.

Today the Museum felt calm allowing the visit to be contemplative of what is anything but a calm and quiet history; this may be a very different experience during term time but certainly today we had a full and informative visit.

28/8/2014 PS
Upcoming, and clearly not to be missed the Jewish Museum will be having a special exhibition of the work of Abram Games as previewed in this 'Observer' feature.