The Great Fire of London exhibition

Oil painting of the Great Fire of London, seen from Newgate, 1670s © Museum of London

September 2 marks the 350^th anniversary of the Great Fire of London. The fire raged through the city for four days, leaving some 100,000 people homeless. A new interactive display at the Museum of London explores the conflagration, and the effect it had on the capital.

© Museum of London

The fire broke out in Thomas Farriner’s bakery in Pudding Lane in the early hours of the morning, and the exhibition starts with a recreation of the narrow street (above), showing how the closely-built wooden properties allowed the flames to spread quickly.

© Museum of London

We then see the fire’s rapid progress as it spreads across a map of London (above), with displays of some of the objects excavated from the ruins – pottery, bricks, tiles, ceramics and glass. This ceramic roof tile (below) which should have been flat and terracotta in colour has been bent in half by temperatures over 1500'C.

© Museum of London

There were no fire brigades at the time - neighbours were expected to work together using equipment stored in churches and the halls of City companies. Among the items on display are a bucket, firehook, and a star exhibit, the museum’s restored hand-pumped fire engine from the late 1670s (below). Recent trials have shown it wouldn’t have been very effective. It was the eventual use of firebreaks – blowing up houses in the path of the fire –  that finally halted its spread.

© Museum of London

Eighty per cent of the City was consumed and the ruins smouldered for months. More than 13,000 houses, official buildings, St Paul’s Cathedral and 87 churches had gone up in smoke at a time when insurance didn’t exist. Shopkeepers lost their entire stock. In one display case is this hoard of 17^th century glass, found under burn debris during excavations of a cellar on Gracechurch Street. 

© Museum of London

 Many Londoners fled to makeshift tent encampments such as the one in Moorfields, and remained there for up to eight years, as arguments raged about how the City should be rebuilt and who would pay for it. The diarist, John Evelyn, who later submitted plans for a new city layout,  wrote: “The poor inhabitants dispersed...some under tents...others in miserable huts and hovels... now reduced to extremist misery and poverty.” King Charles II started a national fund to help them; more than £16,000 (about £2.4 million today) was given.

Map of rebuilt London, 1676 © Museum of London

 In the end, redesigning the City proved too complicated, and the old street pattern was mostly retained (above), with a few improvements, such as the use of brick rather than wood, and the banning of overhanging signs – in future, they were to be mounted flat on the wall, like this one from an inn, of a monkey eating an apple. Not everyone obeyed.

Public buildings were a priority and rebuilding started immediately on Newgate Prison and the Guildhall. The task took more than 40 years. The new St Paul’s, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, was not completed until 1711, and one of the last churches to be finished was St Michael Cornhill in 1722.

The fire was so devastating it made headlines in countries such as France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain. Some of these reports are on display.  A Spanish account says: “It was one of the greatest fires of the kind that the world has ever known.”

© Museum of London

The museum has made good use of its rich collection of objects related to the catastrophe. The atmospheric lighting echoes the fire’s progress, and with the school holidays just starting, the curators have strived to make the exhibition family-friendly, though with enough material – letters, diaries, etc  - for the more academic visitor.
Tickets from £8 online. 
https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/museum-london/whats-on/exhibitions/fire-fire

The Mary Rose revealed

A full, uninterrupted view of Henry VIII’s flagship, the Mary Rose, has been unveiled after a £5.4m museum revamp of her Portsmouth museum – and it's breathtaking.

Compare this with the what could be seen in 2014 (above), when ducting surrounded the timbers to control the humidity and temperature. Now you no longer have to peer through a glass panel or a cloud of moisture. Floor to ceiling windows and an open balcony, entered through an air-lock,  allow a clear view right across the whole structure.

The Mary Rose is the only 16th century warship on display in the world.

This model shows how she looked when she sank on July 19, 1545, during the Battle of the Solent. She went down suddenly in a skirmish with four French galleys. Of the 500 men on board, only 35 survived.  Attempts to salvage her in Tudor times failed, although a few large objects were recovered. Almost 300 years later two divers investigating a fishermen’s net snag found old timber and a gun that was identified as being from the Mary Rose. 

Some things were salvaged and sold off, but when the cost of the operation outweighed the income, the project was abandoned. It wasn’t until the rise of Scuba diving as a hobby in the 1960s that the wreck was rediscovered. She was covered in silt and under 14 metres of water, so the task of raising her was complex. Between 1979 and 1982 more than 500 divers and diving archaeologists undertook over 27,000 dives, until on Oct 11 1982, cradled in a lifting frame, the Mary Rose surfaced once again, was lowered on to a barge and towed home to Portsmouth. Since then, the conservation has been continuous. The hull was first sprayed with a mist of fresh chilled water and then with a water soluble wax. In April 2013, housed in a new, purpose-built museum in the Historic Dockyard (below), next to Admiral Nelson's Victory, she entered a stage of controlled air-drying, which is now complete.

The ship was a time capsule, containing more Tudor objects than in the rest of the world put together. There was no ship’s manifest, so the names of the crew who lost their lives when she went down remain unknown. But archaeologists have built up pictures of many of them through their remains and the possessions that survived under the silt. It's enabled them to create moving images of life on board, projected at regular intervals on to the structure.

The nine galleries around the museum house 19,000 artefacts, including musical instruments, 400 leather shoes, longbows, gold coins, dice, guns, a manicure set and pewter platters and tankards. (Pewter was expensive, so some on board must have been wealthy.)

A possible clue to an identity comes from a wooden bowl, carved with the words ‘Nye Coep Cook’. Was this the name of the cook?

The bulk of the funding for the project has come from the Heritage Lottery Fund, with the rest from charitable donors. And this may not be the end of the story. A great deal of the ship, including the forecastle and rudder, is still on the seabed, waiting to be salvaged. If more money can be found, who knows what other secrets may yet be revealed?
http://www.historicdockyard.co.uk/mary-rose-revealed 
http://www.visitportsmouth.co.uk/things-to-do/portsmouth-historic-dockyard-p54183

The America's Cup World Series comes to Portsmouth

The Louis Vuitton America’s Cup World Series was being held in Portsmouth this weekend, with teams from Sweden, Japan, America, France, New Zealand and Great Britain competing to challenge the reigning champions – currently Oracle Team USA – in the final World Cup event in Bermuda next year. 

Friday's crowds had the bonus of a spectacular aerial display by the Red Arrows. The skill of the pilots as they performed their breathtaking manoeuvres was matched by that of the crews of the AC45F catamarans as they fought to capture the advantage of every breath of wind in the Solent.

The America’s Cup started in 1851 as a 53-mile race around the Isle of Wight between a racing yacht built by the New York Yacht Club and a fleet of British yachts. The American schooner, the America, won, and that’s how the cup and the race got its name. America went on to hold the trophy for more than a hundred years, until in 1983 it was taken by an Australian team. In 1995 it went to New Zealand, who sucessfully fought off a challenge in 2000.  Switzerland won it in 2003 and again in 2007 but in 2010 it was taken back by America.  

This time the British hopes rest with Land Rover BAR (above), under the expert eye of Sir Ben Ainslie. The next World Series event will take place in Toulon, France, in September. There will be one more World Series event in Fukuoka, Japan, in November before the Qualifiers and Challenger play-offs next summer in Bermuda. Will 2017 be the year the America's Cup comes back to Great Britain? 

https://www.americascup.com/en/world-series-AC45.html

Spectacular views from the Tate Modern extension

There’s more than art at the new Tate Modern extension.

Go up to the 10^th floor of Switch House - named after the former electrical substation that still occupies part of the site – and you’ll find stunning (and free) views across London. The viewing gallery goes right round the building, so as well as looking north and east across the Thames to the city, you can see south and west London – and peer down at the show rooms of the neighbouring apartment blocks that are springing up around the regenerated area.

The brick extension is by Herzog + de Meuron, the architects who created Tate Modern out of the shell of the disused Bankside power station back in 2000. The extra space has allowed the reorganisation of the permanent collection, and seventy-five per cent of the works on display in the new galleries have been acquired since the opening of the first building, now known as the Boiler House.

Critics have described Switch House as ‘dazzling’, ‘adventurous’ and ‘one of the most spectacular buildings London has seen in decades’. The architects say the building’s twisted shape grew out of the former oil storage tanks that lie beneath it .There are few barriers around the art works, and the floors are linked by a sweeping staircase..

Fittingly, where a bridge links the two buildings, there’s a new Tate acquisition, ‘Tree’ by Ai Weiwei. The way the Chinese artist has transformed pieces of old wood into an artwork echoes the way the former power station site has been given a new life.

 

http://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-modern

The £2.99 kit that could save a holiday

I wish I’d seen this tiny kit before our last holiday. We were on a barge cruise through the Camargue, from Sète to Arles, when not one, but two fellow passengers found themselves in trouble on the same day when their glasses came apart because the screw had fallen out of a hinge and was lost. Pins and Sellotape really didn’t work. Rescue finally came through our lovely guide, Peggy, who heard about the problem the next day and during a subsequent coach excursion organised a diversion to an optician who was able to do repairs on the spot. We were lucky – in another country and with no Peggy to help, it might have been very different, especially if driving was involved. So in future, a SnapIt kit will now be packed along with essentials such as sun cream and insect repellent.

The kit contains a screwdriver and five screws in various sizes. There’s a useful video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu42527YjKQ

It’s available from Maplins, Wilkinsons, QVC and through Centurion Hardware for around £2.99. www.snapitscrew.com