2020 Vision: Meandering Museums

Looking for a place to come in from the cold on a London winter’s day? Judith Schrut thinks you can’t beat a visit to one of London’s incredible range of small museums and galleries.

Much as I love London and have called it home for many years, I have California blood and a built-in allergy to cold weather. That means I’m always on the hunt for simple, pleasurable, budget-friendly ways to come in from the cold on a winter’s day. For this, it’s hard to beat a visit to one of London’s incredible range of small museums and galleries. When it comes to these countless gems, it’s hard to know where to start.  No, that’s not entirely true: I’d start with the Charles Dickens Museum, in the only remaining home of the beloved Victorian writer and social activist and one of the most intimate and enchanting small museums I know. In this renovated Georgian terraced house in a Bloomsbury back street, you can immerse yourself in the sights and sounds and the living spirit of the man, wander the fascinating rooms where Dickens lived with wife Catherine, their 10 children and servants, where he slept, ate, hosted elaborate dinner parties and wrote Oliver Twist, Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby. The Museum also hosts atmospheric candlelit evenings, tours, costumed walks and intimate performances. From amongst 100,000 treasures in the Museum’s collection, you can view original manuscripts and drawings, his writing desk and more unusual items like a commode (chair with a concealed chamber pot) and hip bath. There’s a cosy and charming café and walled courtyard garden to sip hot chocolate and sample some enticing cakes. But the Dickens Museum is only one masterpiece in London’s Museum Mile. A walk along Museum Mile will give you fascinating insights into London past and present and a chance to discover 14 museums and galleries and their diverse collections, many with free entry. These include the British Museum,  Sir John Soane’s Museum, Wellcome Collection, Cartoon Museum and Foundling Museum. Last week I went to see the Foundling Museum’s latest exhibition, Portraying Pregnancy: From Holbein to Social Media. It’s a fascinating, landmark show,  small but perfectly formed, shining a light on images of pregnancy in (mainly) British art over the past 500 years. It was a stunning reminder that until the twentieth century many women spent most of their adult years pregnant, that pregnancy was risky and dangerous and that pregnancy and childbirth were the most common causes of death for women. The exhibition explores how pregnancy was, or more often was not, represented in art and how attitudes to pregnancy have changed in recent times. Don’t miss this unique chance to see exquisitely detailed Elizabethan portraits of visibly pregnant women (like Marcus Gheeraerts II Unknown Woman pictured above) in the same space as Annie Liebovitz’s renowned photographs of the tastefully naked, heavily pregnant Demi Moore and Serena Williams for the covers of Vanity Fair magazines in 1991 and 2017 and the recent Instagram portrait of Beyoncé Knowles, veiled, surrounded by flowers and proudly pregnant with twins, which clocked up 11 million “likes” to become the most popular Instagram post of the year. Stay tuned for the next post in our 2020 Vision miniseries. We’ll also keep you posted on more must-sees from London’s unbeatable museums and galleries scene during the coming year.