3: Geffrye Museum

136 Kingsland Road, London, E2 8EA

www.geffrye-museum.org.uk

Visited on Sunday 2 December 2012

Since I moved to Stoke Newington, I have taken the bus to work down the Kingsland Road most weekdays. Once you get through the hectic bottle-neck that is Dalston, the bus stops at a very attractive building called the Geffrye Museum, a converted 18th-century almshouse of the Ironmongers’ Company. It contains a fascinating series of rooms fitted out in the manner of middle-class British living rooms from 1600 to the present day, and calls itself a museum of the home. This visit – to see the Christmas Past exhibition – was prompted by Anna of the Karenina’s penchant for Yuletide happenings and general affection for the season.

Pleasantly simple tree decoration

The layout of the museum is very straightforward, dictated of course by the design of the original building – you walk from one end to the other passing through rooms containing furniture and décor from particular bygone eras. Each one is arranged as a tableau and a little board on an easel describes what’s going on, as if the people who live there have just popped out for a moment. Between these scenes are rooms containing typical museum cabinets of items such as plates, paintings, chairs, lampshades and so on, with interesting information boards. There is a good balance of things to read and things to look at. For the Christmas Past exhibition the curators have adorned each of the rooms with seasonal decorations of the time, and created scenes to depict what would have been happening in them, which also explain the origins of our various festive traditions.

Informative notice

Indeed, comfortable

Sure takes a break

We were immediately struck by how un-Christmassy the rooms from 1600 to the mid 1800s were. This is because most of the things we now associate with Christmas – decorated fir trees, holly, mistletoe, cards and sparkly decorations – only date from the Victorian period. The Christmas tree custom, for example, became popular with the general public following the publication in 1848 of illustrations showing the Royal Family standing around their decorated tree. The actual tradition seems to have come to Britain earlier than that though, imported in the 1780s by Queen Charlotte, George III’s wife, from her native Germany. Christmas cards were invented by an Englishman, Sir Henry Cole, who in 1843 came up with the idea in order to avoid having to write long letters of seasonal greeting to his many business and social contacts. With the introduction of a cheap postage rate for unsealed envelopes and postcards in the 1870s, card sending dramatically increased. It seems the postal system was a little more efficient then than it is today, as apparently when they said ‘post early for Christmas’ they meant ‘get it in the post by Christmas Eve’!

Delighted by the 1850s Christmas vibes

Sure gets involved with the other toys - can you spot him?

The rooms from later periods, particularly those from the decades of the 20^th Century, contained items and scenes more familiar to us. In some ways these rooms are more interesting anyway because by the time you get to the 1930s, most of the items you’d find in a living room of today (sofa, bookcases, tv/radio etc) are present, and it’s rather charming to see recognisable pieces in old-fashioned styles.

Mindful that museum visitors require sustenance, the Geffrye Museum people have built a rather good extension to the building, which contains the café. Unfortunately, we arrived too late to sample its goods, though we did have a good look at it and concluded that the crockery is tasteful and the space itself is very pleasant. It smelled of cinnamon and the cakes we were too late to eat looked good! Though it was dark when we were there, the windows all down one side of the room probably afford a rather nice view of the gardens during the daytime. [I told Brother B Man the Mystic about our visit and he said he’d overheard a most interesting conversation on the bus between two ladies who’d been there – apparently the gardener is really helpful and gave some excellent advice on growing herbs out of season].

The last part of the exhibition consisted of a Christmas tree to which we were invited to attach a Christmas wish. Some of these were rather strange: ‘I want to meet more famous people next year’ being my favourite. Sure brought his irrepressible positivity to the proceedings, of course.

Sure can do anything good at all times

Christmas wishes

The shop was not bad – it’s quite small, but had some nice books, and some festive finger puppets, which pleased A of the K. Not as much as her biography though. We both bought nice postcards.

Caption not required

Given that we’d missed out on the café within the museum itself, we decided to go into Shoreditch in search of coffee and cake. This is a fairly fruitless mission at 5pm on a Sunday. Nonetheless, we took a pleasant walk down Brick Lane and through Spitalfields Market, finishing up at Patisserie Valerie. Cakes aplenty, obvs.

Caaaaaaaaaaaaakes

The waitress was pretty grumpy, but we sat in comfortable red leather armchairs while we waited for her to bring us our latte, cappuccino, apple juice and sweet foods.

Post-culture feast

Over-indulged pig

Almond Marzipan cake (Anna of the Karenina)

“Oh my god, I love almonds. The topping is amazing, but hmmm, the inside is a bit, you know, *makes slightly ambiguous hand signal*. There is a questionable layer of jam, and the pastry is a bit dry. But I would still give it a 7 out of 10.”

Apricot Danish (thepateface)

“Very aesthetically pleasing, with an enjoyable layer of icing on top. Very tasty jam within. Slight dryness to the pastry, but it is 6pm and it was probably made this morning, so I will let them off. 7.5 out of 10. Oh wait – having eaten through to the middle section I see they have omitted to place an actual apricot there, the presence of which I had falsely been led to expect following the visible apricots at either end. Slightly vexing. I’m downgrading to a 7 out of 10.”

The coffees were served in very wide cups that were as big as soup bowls (French) and the drinks were pleasant, though not mindblowing. That’s fine. £13.80 for the lot seemed fairly reasonable given the nice ambience and general quality of the goods.

Sure is revived following his sugar overload

On the whole it was agreed that the Geffrye Museum is definitely worth visiting once. We suspected that the café might be a draw in itself, particularly if you’re in the area on a Sunday afternoon and fancy a nice cup of tea and a view of some gardens. It’s probably on the whole more interesting for grown ups than children, and there is a bit of a congestion issue if it’s busy – something that is apparently to be addressed by a £16.3m development project, due for completion in 2015. The museum’s website has some nice photos and a virtual tour. It does also say that although they accommodate corporate events, the building and grounds cannot be hired out for weddings. I know of at least one person reading this who will be disappointed!