V&A Museum of Childhood
Cambridge Heath Road, London, E2 9PA
Visited on Sunday 20 January 2013
If the media hype is to be believed only
the most intrepid would have ventured out onto the treacherous pavements of
London on a day like this – but, unfazed by the powdery snow, I and my Russian friend Anna of the Karenina sallied forth to the V&A Museum of Childhood
in Bethnal Green for the final culturecake visit of the project.
The Museum has existed in its present
incarnation, ie focusing on childhood, since the 1970s, but it was originally
built in the late 1860s. It’s a very interesting building – the whole
exhibition space is one huge oblong room, with a very high arched ceiling,
which looks a bit like the inside of a Victorian railway station. The floor is
notable as it consists of a pattern done in mosaic – by the female inmates of
Woking Gaol apparently. The layout is interesting too because the central part
of the room contains the gift shop and the café, with the actual exhibition
items set on two raised floors around the edge.
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| Notable ceiling and floor |
We decided to begin upstairs and work our
way back down to the café, but I don’t think it really would have mattered. The
exhibits are presented in a very old-fashioned way – large square glass cases
with shelves inside, set in long rows. The only other museum I’ve seen like
this recently is the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford (shrunken heads!). The Museum
of Childhood shares another aspect with the Pitt Rivers – it’s pretty dark, so
that when you’re looking into the cases, you cast your own shadow over the
things you’re looking at. This is not the best really, and made me realize that
even though they can seem gimmicky in places, museums that have modernized
actually show off their items much more effectively.
The layout also seemed a little bit
haphazard. They did manage to group some similar items in the same place, so
most of the dolls houses were together for example, but one or two were dotted
among other things and there were a few random cases of miscellaneous items
that seemed to be outside of the scheme altogether.
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| Rehearsing for a possible career change |
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| Malevolent beings that come alive in horror films and your nightmares |
The vast majority of the exhibits are toys
and so there is a fair amount of scope for nostalgia as you wander around among
the toy animals, board games, zoetropes, robots, puppets, toy cars and trains,
dolls and figurines, and a whole world of miniaturised domestic equipment,
including vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers, tea sets, twin tub washing machines,
irons and kettles. I found myself saying ‘Oh my god! I used to have one of
those!’ fairly frequently, though as this is very much a collection of British items,
Anna of the Karenina didn’t come across many items from her own childhood.
There was a rather lovely set of Russian dolls however, which was pleasing, as
well as a couple of Russian teddy bears.
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| Ruskie bears |
We found ourselves reflecting on how the
toys we favoured and games we played with them as children connected with the
activities and ambitions we have now. Both of us, it seems, were interested in
the toys that were like people – ie dolls or action figures – and made up
dramas for them that would absorb us for hours at a time. Miss Karenina leaned
more towards real family life in her stories, whereas I got wrapped up in
florid medieval tales of chivalry and warfare in mine (I had a big set of Lego
Knights). But essentially we were both interested as children in how people
relate to one another. It has continued to fascinate me as an adult, though
it’s something I’m more likely to muse about over a glass of wine than act out
using little figurines and a gory version of some Arthurian legend. (God what a
dork I was).
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| Having fun in the sandpit |
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| Punch and Judy aka Pato and Sure |
It was also interesting to observe what
kinds of things have been produced as toys. One lovely item at the beginning of
the exhibition was a bus conductor’s outfit, complete with leather shoulder bag
and little machine for punching tickets, dating from the 1940s. The kitchen and
cleaning equipment, plus the little prams, pushchairs and baby dolls seem
designed to ensure we are rehearsed from our earliest days in the ways of adult
domestic lives, while Action Man, toy guns, little tanks and fantasy goody and
baddie figurines are perhaps intended to get us ready for the darker side of
being a grown up. There was also a huge array of puzzles and craft items, plus
board games to encourage us to compete nicely together, and visual wonders such
as kaleidoscopes to feed our imaginations.
As A of the K observed, it’s almost
impossible now for us to imagine what goes on in the mind of a child, or to
remember what it was like when we were children ourselves. At one point we
stopped to watch a little girl murmuring away to her two little dolls, quietly
asking them where they wanted to sit and then explaining to them why their
choices were good or bad. It was heart-warming, but also triggered very distant
memories of a time when it was OK to devote one hundred percent of your
attention to such a scene because there simply weren’t any other
responsibilities in life.
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| Sure |
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| For the competitive among us |
It does seem to me that the Museum of
Childhood is missing a trick in the way it’s laid out. By organizing the items
differently they could generate a much more powerful narrative about childhood,
and provoke some interesting thought about it. Setting up a route through the
museum by date would enable them to show how developments in technology have
affected toy manufacture and design, and illustrate more clearly the ways in
which play has evolved as the role of children in society, the expectations of
them, and the expectations children have of the world have changed. There were
very few information boards, and the collection as a whole doesn’t seem to be
actually curated – I much prefer a museum where the collection is presented to
me in a way that makes me think, where parallels are drawn between exhibits or
where I’m invited to make associations between one thing and another. They
could easily do this without compromising the simple joy of seeing loads of
toys, which is clearly what the children coming to the museum are excited by.
Some of the exhibits, particularly the
older ones, were downright creepy – the puppets especially – but, despite the clunky
layout and old-fashioned glass case presentation, most of it was rather
charming. Both of us very much enjoyed the dolls houses, and I loved the
trainset and miniature village. A of the K was pretty taken with the rocking
horses, which were in use by some miniature humans, egged on by cooing parents.
It’s worth pointing out that there are of course a lot of real live children in
the museum, so if you are averse to these creatures and their periodic squawks
and yelps I don’t recommend you come here!
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| I loved this! |
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| Not sure what's going on here |
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| Designed to scare the living shit out of small people |
After a proper and thorough look around
everything, hunger took over and we made for the centrally situated café, which
is in fact a branch of Benugo. Basically this means that everything is pretty
expensive. But it’s rather nice being in the middle of the whole museum, and
the various little kids toddling around are funny to watch. At the table next
to us was a mischievous little beast of a one-year-old, who managed in the
split second that both his parents’ heads were turned to dispatch a ceramic cup
onto the tiled floor (smash), followed not long after by its saucer (louder
smash). The waiter came over to sweep up wearing a resigned expression – I
guess this kind of thing happens all the time – while the baby looked at us
with innocent wide eyes and a composed mouth as if to say ‘ummm, yep, it wasn’t
me’.
Anyway, onto the refreshments.
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| Hole-filling if not mind-blowing |
Chocolate cake and cappuccino with English
Toffee syrup (A of the K)
“This looks dry but it isn’t! It has the
consistency of a brownie in fact. The icing is delicious. I’d go so far as to
say it’s one of the best I’ve had of its type. Coffee also delicious. 9 out of
10.”
Tuna baguette, pear and blackberry cake and
a latte (thepateface)
“Aaargh, eyes bigger than stomach… But,
yeah this is ok, nice ‘artisan’ bread, bit sloppy to eat though. Cake has an
unexpected ginger flavour and is a bit crumblier than I’d like. Coffee is very
bitter indeed. Generally all ok – I was hungry so it’s done its job – but not
hugely impressive for the cost. 6.5 out of 10.”
Nice conversation and more entertainment
from the not-so-innocent innocent on the next table followed food consumption
and then it was time to go home so we forgot to go back to the shop. We’d had a
quick scan earlier though and it seems to contain lots of activity items and
little toys for children. I didn’t see any postcards, though I might not have
looked hard enough.
After a long wait at the bus stop along
with a mad drunk and three unutterably posh girls, the 254 finally pulled up to
take me back to my lovely warm flat, and afforded a 20-minute ponder on today’s
visit, and on the project as a whole. The Museum of Childhood was all right,
not spectacular, though it’s kind of fun to see items in front of you that you
haven’t even thought about for decades – and to look at toys from other eras.
As for the culturecake project, I’m really glad I chose to do it, though I
visited far fewer places than I thought I would over the three months. It’s
certainly re-ignited my interest in museums, galleries and places of interest,
and though the official project ends here, I imagine I’ll be making further
contributions in the coming weeks and months. Thank you again to A of the K,
Brother B Man the Mystic, MinustheMatt, Charlie, Brother Neil and of course
little brass face himself, Sure, for joining me on this journey of pleasant cultural
discovery.
