Still in the Past, But Looking Forward

My museum visiting this holiday hasn't stopped just because I left Cumbria: this last week I've made my way to a few more places I've either never seen, or wanted to revisit. The Carrawburgh Mithraeum up near Hadrian's Wall is a strange place to find in the middle of nowhere; it has a larger equivalent in London, now beneath the premises of finance house Bloomberg on Walbrook, and thanks to their largesse costs nothing to visit. You are pointed in front of a wall of artefacts, then go downstairs into a darkened chamber to learn more about Mithraism, and finally are ushered down yet again to the Temple itself - rather more expansive than the Carrawburgh one, this is enlivened with an 'immersive experience' of sound and light, Latin chanting and quite subtle visual effects doing just enough to conjure a sense of being somewhere you really shouldn't be.

This Thursday I was in Cambridge visiting Dr Bones and spent a couple of hours at the Fitzwilliam Museum: it could have been longer, but two hours in a single museum is enough for anyone. The Palladian Hall is, perhaps, the most lavish introduction to any museum anywhere; there were plenty of tourists like me, but also a remarkable number of young people sat drawing in front of archaeological fragments. 

Finally, I last saw inside the Museum of London while I was on my Museum Studies course, so that was a good thirty years ago, and my visit was a bit of a last-minute decision not to drag myself across the capital last Tuesday. It turned out to be the right one, because the other option, the Wallace Collection, isn't going anywhere, while the MofL is going to close in December pending its move from the Barbican, where it's been since 1975, to a new site at West Smithfield occupying the cavernous ex-market buildings there. There was much to delight in, though I found the reconstructed debtor's cell from Wellclose Square Prison terrifying.

Telling the story of a sprawling capital city from the time before it was a city throughout its incarnations towards becoming global and multivocal, with no one coherent story of any kind, is a daunting prospect: the existing MofL does it so cohesively and concisely that were I a member of staff I wouldn't be sure whether I should be excited or terrified by the idea of uprooting the whole place and doing it all again somewhere else. I wonder if the mocked-up Lyons Corner House complete with back-projected 'nippy' will make it through (she even appears on Wikipedia).