Petrie Museum – step back in time

Nairtesitnufer's Coffin

I have walked passed the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology every day for five years so today I finally took the opportunity to venture inside and got quite a surprise. Climbing three flights of stairs I entered a museum that looks like it is stuck in a time warp c.1900 and is stuffed to the rafters with artefacts dating back 5,000 years.

The staff were extremely helpful and start you off with a tour of the collection before leaving you alone to browse at your own pleasure. With the aid of a torch, you can see right into the ancient glass fronted wooden cabinets.

The museum was established by Sir William Flinders Petrie in 1892 and houses a collection of 80,000 objects, making it one of the greatest collections of Egyptian archaeology in the world. Only around ten percent of the artefacts are on display owing to space constraints but that didn’t stop the museum from winning the ‘Classic Award’ at the Museum & Heritage Awards for Excellence.

What is on display is still an amazing array of ancient jewellery and pottery as well as one of the oldest garments in the world, the Tarkhan dress, which dates back to 3000 BC. The collection contains detailed stone carvings from the Old Kingdom (c.2500 BC) and ornate Roman portraits from the 2nd century but my favourite was the richly adorned and perfectly preserved wooden coffin case of Nairtesitnufer dating from 750 BC.

The museum, housed within University College London (UCL), is about to be developed and there are plans to create a purpose-built Institute for Cultural Heritage to bring together other priceless artefacts from within UCL’s collections into a new modern purpose-built building.

Before that happens I would recommend you visit the Petrie Museum to get up close and personal to the artefacts and experience how museums used to be.

Kevin

Study London – www.studylondon.ac.uk

Under your feet in London

Source: Museum of London/Wellcome Images

The Wellcome Trust is one of the world’s largest medical charities but it is also one of the most exciting exhibition spaces in London. Opened in 2007, the Wellcome Collection’s exhibition series has never failed to educate and fascinate in equal measure. Its recent ‘Atoms to Patterns’ exhibition brought together groundbreaking and stylish materials designed by the Festival Pattern Group for the 1951 Festival of Britain alongside the scientific diagrams that inspired them. The exhibition displayed an eclectic array of textiles, wallpapers, fashion, furniture, laminates, carpets and tableware all containing patterns based on X-ray crystallography diagrams. My favourite was the hemoglobin coffee table created by scientist Dr Helen Megaw.

The current exhibition, ‘Skeletons – London’s buried bones’, is in association with the Museum of London. It displays 26 skeletons from the museum’s astonishing collection of 17,000 and for each skeleton the curator has uncovered the ailments and illnesses each person suffered during their lifetime as well as their likely cause of death.

The skeletons were discovered across London, some dating back 16 centuries and were drawn from Roman burial sites of pre-Christian London. Others came from the massive plague pits dug in London from the 14th century to the last great outbreak in 1665.

The lasting imprint that illness and disease has left on the bones is fascinating and really brings history to life. The exhibition is an excellent way of looking at the hardships experienced by ordinary Londoners which contemporary writings rarely cover but it’s not for the faint hearted. The case containing the tiny skeleton of an 11 month old baby is arresting but that’s the beauty of the Wellcome Collection – its exhibitions are challenging and thought provoking and never, never dull.

Kevin

Study London – www.studylondon.ac.uk

Summer in the city

Serpentine Gallery

I love being in London during the summer. There’s less traffic on the road, there’s less of a crowd on public transport and the new Serpentine Pavilion is erected temporarily in Kensington Gardens. In previous years the Serpentine Pavilion, which is in effect a temporary café and a place to huddle and keep out of the rain, has been designed by some of the world’s most inventive architects such as Zaha Hadid, Daniel Liebeskind, Oscar Niemeyer and last year’s amazing spinning top-type structure designed by the Norwegian artist Olafur Eliasson.

This year’s pavilion doesn’t disappoint with the legendary architect Frank Gehry designing a building that defies gravity. Its large timber planks support a complex network of overlapping sheets of glass. Gehry described the building as ‘a wooden timber structure that acts as an urban street running from the park to the existing Gallery’ and that’s exactly what it does. It’s also a great place to sit and drink a cup of coffee and eat one of the café’s excellent cakes.

The 'concrete armadillo'

This summer, London has gone pavilion-crazy with a range of temporary Pavilions springing up all over the city. Two of the most dramatic have been created by students form the Architecture Association (AA) School of Architecture on Bedford Square. The first looks like a concrete armadillo nestled amongst the Georgian splendour of the square. A competition winner, it was designed by AA students Alan Dempsey and Alvin Huang and at lunchtime is full with local office workers eating their lunch. The second Pavilion, called The Swoosh, is something altogether different. It’s more a geometric puzzle than a place to eat sandwiches. While it was also designed by AA students, its wooden frame envelopes a street lamp so at night the white structure throws an eerie light across the square.

The Fresh Flower Pavilion

Finally, the temporary Fresh Flower Pavilion that has appeared in a number of locations around London to celebrate the month-long London Festival of Architecture. Designed by London-based architects Tonkin Liu, to me it looked like a huge ripe yellow banana that had spilt in the sunshine. I thought the design was really funny and loved seeing the distinctive yellow leaves in the distance when you least expected it.

Remember, you can find architecture courses in London at the Study London website.

Kevin

StudyLondon – www.studylondon.ac.uk

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