The Museum of London

I wanted to visit The Museum of London the last time we were here and didn’t make it. The kids and I finally went a couple of weeks ago, and it was everything I hoped it would be.

(One thing I love about the main London museums is that admission is free, which means we don’t have the spend the entire day trying to see everything because it’s our only chance. We can spend a couple of hours, leave when we’re tired, and plan to come back another day to see more. An approach I highly recommend if you have the luxury of time.)

The day we went, the museum was running an “Archaeology Up Close” session, for which museum curators set up tables in the lobby with some artifacts from the collection, to allow visitors to get an up close look and to ask questions. The focus of the session on the day we went was x-rays and what they reveal about seemingly insignificant lumps. The curators had picked out a large handful of artifacts from storage, some of which looked like the aforementioned lumps. But they also brought x-rays of the lumps, which revealed a set of keys, or a lock, or the bits of a boot spur.

The lumps are usually left as is, because any further conservation effort, i.e. trying to extract the artifact from surrounding material, would likely destroy the artifact. If they think the object will survive the conservation effort, they might do that. We saw a knife blade that had been conserved, plus the before photo and the x-rays. X-rays revealed a decorated blade, which turned out to be quite pretty.

One curator we talked to had also brought the x-rays for a set of dice that were on display in the gallery. A mudlarker (someone who walks the banks of the Thames at low tide, looking for interesting bits) had found a small lead container with a set of tiny (not more than 1/4″ on a side, if that) dice and brought them to the museum. When the curator x-rayed the dice, she found the dice were weighted with mercury and therefore used for cheating. We could tell by the her enthusiasm that these objects were a favorite. We found them in the gallery, and they were much smaller than I originally imagined.

More about the museum itself in another post…