Two Museums and a Graveyard

Apart from us all dropping from covid - and even that shows signs of tailing off - the parish is quiet, so it was as well that I went out sightseeing yesterday. Not many people identify the sights of Tottenham and Walthamstow as ones they especially want to visit, but I thought I might take in a couple of suburban museums, and so my journey took me to Bruce Castle and Vestry House.

Bruce Castle Museum in Tottenham sits in its own park. Buried somewhere in its current state is a Tudor mansion but it's been so mucked about with over the centuries hardly any of that is visible. As you go around the galleries hints of the manor house, and then school, the building used to be emerge in the form of its collection of fireplaces, staircase, and great iron kitchen range. I liked Bruce Castle because of its maximalist approach of absolutely packing display cases with stuff, boards with photos, and not-obviously relevant kit such as a statue of a small girl embroidering in a corridor (you almost fall over her). Tottenham is of course a very multicultural part of London but although this gets a mention here and there - there was a great display on textile designer Althea McNish and some information about businesses that served the black community - it remains to be integrated with the rest. Upstairs was a show about Edwardian artist Beatrice Offor, 'Sisters, Sirens and Saints', and I was delighted to find that one of those saints she depicted was kneeling next to a shattered wheel.

I remember Vestry House as having a good name in the social-history museum world once upon a time, but I was less taken with it. Its 'institutional olive'-painted hallways express something of the grimness the building might have had when it was a workhouse, and there was a very nice display about the local music scene in the late '80s and early '90s, colourful and full of personal history, but I was surprised to see the sheer amount of sunlight strafing the objects in the 'domestic life' rooms upstairs. That area is all hessian and 1980s captions and must surely be due a refurb!

But Vestry House is in the most picturesque bit of Walthamstow, even if the parish church was swathed in scaffolding. The view across the graveyard to the Ancient House, allegedly the oldest dwelling-house in London, is as pleasing as you could want.