Museum of London

Hubby and I went to Museum of London at the beginning of the month, but I was busy with other things and I kept postponing it. I made a small selection from the exhibits seen at the museum, as there are so many interesting artifacts on display.

The Museum starts with life before London, when there were only a few small tribes and then goes to the Roman period.

I sometimes have a strange feeling when I’m looking around Roman exhibits in UK as I’m so familiar with them since childhood. I grew up in an important and busy trading seaport built on top of an old Roman city and all of the museums were full of amphorae, arches, mosaics and big stone tombs… on the opposite side of Europe. Having the same ancestors and a common piece of history while living thousands of miles apart is strange.

This beauty is a Roman oak ladder, found in a Roman well. It has 5.6m/220″ and it was bigger than that. Is impressive that it survived for such a long time.

This is how a wealthy Roman would live.

After the Romans the other periods are represented nice. There are lots of artifacts from the Saxon times, the Tudor period, the dissolution. I had to skip showing those as it would have been a very very long post.

These copper printing plates are from 1559. They were used to produce a detailed map of London and it’s the earliest view of the city. Only 3 plates survived from a set of 15, these are 2 of them. The third one is in a museum in Germany.

This is how the printed map looked like. It’s a replica as none from the original ones survived.

Here are some artefacts from the Great Fire of London, 1666. On the left side there are some metal hooks binded together by the heat and a part of a wooden barrel. On the right side there are decorated tiles and some glass. It’s amazing these still exists today, that they were kept in a period when museums didn’t exist.

Doll houses are amazing and the old ones are better. The trend started when Queen Victoria was a little girl and she was playing with beautiful wooden dolls.

The Scottish Highlander figure was placed at the door of London tobacconists as a way to advertise that there was snuff on sale. The snuff is a powdered tobacco snorted up the nose. The wooden Scottish Highlander was used because it was popular among Scotts, from Highlands.

The museum continues with a Victorian walk, a replica of a street from the Victorian period, with lots of shops found at that time, like the milliner, the tailor, the pawnshop, the grocer, the pub, a card shop and others.

The glasses at the glass shop look very nice with complex designs.

I had to stop at the baker’s cart. Baker’s hand cart was used to deliver the muffins, the scones and other goodies.

Hubby spotted the syphon, we both had it and use it as kids. Mine was an old sifon (this is the Romanian word for it) that my grandpa had.

There were wartime and post-war exhibits.

The Lord Mayor’s State Coach is a beauty. The state coach was used for the Lord Mayor’s procession in November 1757 and has been used ever since. Is not a surprise that is deemed to be the oldest ceremonial vehicle in regular use in the world.