Museum Visits

We took advantage of the Bank Holidays earlier this week to visit a few museums: Gavin and I went to the Imperial War Museum and I sojourned across town to the Geffrye Museum.  Two very different experiences! I was interested in seeing the "Ministry of Food" exhibition at the Imperial War Museum.  It was all about food rationing and vegetable gardening during WWII - very timely given the current "local food" movement. Now we understand why eating out has become so culturally important here as people dined more at communal eating houses to forgo using their rationed food at home. Before the war, the British imported a surprising amount of food necessities from all around the world and by planting vegetables - even in Kensington Gardens - they were able to eat more independently. That exhibition and the rest of the museum was really well done.  It contains WWI and WWII exhibitions, full size trench and Blitz recreations, a hall full of tanks and planes and a wholly intense Holocaust exhibit.  It was all so much information but we really enjoyed ourselves. We even passed the house where Captain Bligh lived on the walk from the tube stop. History comes alive! ;)

Then I visited the Geffrye Museum - a museum devoted to British interiors of the "middling class" through the last 400 years. The building consists of around ten full scale recreations of living rooms complete with period specific furnishings and wall decor. I was keen to get to the museum before next week as the rooms were set up to display Christmas traditions during the different time periods as well. I took more pictures than I normally do in museums, but I couldn't help myself.... the recreations were so precise and the furnishings well maintained! I decided against a picture of the reception from the 1990's.  That room had a stereo playing a Moby CD. Hee.. the mid 90's aren't long enough ago to make the room a novelty for me ;)

unfortunately, I didn't bring my camera, just used my phone
but the Imperial War Museum reminded me of the Air
and Space Museum at the Smithsonian

dining hall, mid 17th century

parlor, late 18th century

drawing room, mid-to-late 19th century

drawing room, 1890 showing "aesthetic movement"
known for artful furnishings heavily influenced by Japan.

living room, 1935

living room, 1965