More London Museums and Galleries re-open

In addition to the museums and galleries mentioned in my last post, more venues are re-opening and announcing their plans for the coming weeks. All of the safety measures mentioned in my last blog are applicable to these venues, and all require pre-booking online in advance of any visit (including for members and corporate supporters), helping to ensure safe access to the arts across the city.

The Wallace Collection is now open to again, welcoming visitors seven days per week with revised opening hours from 11am to 3pm. There is a one way route through the historic rooms and collection, and their temporary exhibition ‘Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company’ will re-open on 29 July. The cloakroom and café remain closed, but there is a coffee cart outside the main entrance and the shop is open but taking payment by contactless/card only.

Dulwich Picture Gallery re-opened its gardens alongside the café for takeaway and a pop-up shop from Saturday 4 July, allowing the public to safely enjoy their three acres of outdoor space and the exterior of the building designed by Sir John Soane.

Historic Royal Palaces who look after six sites are also re-opening their indoor and outdoor spaces. From Friday 10 July The Tower of London started welcoming visitors again and will be open on Wednesday to Sunday from 11am until 6pm, with last admission at 5pm. Hampton Court Palace will re-open with the exception of the Magic Garden and Maze from Friday 17 July, on Wednesday to Sunday from 10.30am until 5pm. Kensington Palace will welcome visitors again from Thursday 30 July and will be open to the public on Wednesday to Sunday from 10.30am until 5pm. Banqueting House and Kew Palace however will remain closed until March 2021.

Charles Dickens Museum will be re-opening on Saturday 25 July, with revised opening hours of Friday to Sunday from 10am until 5pm (with last admission at 4pm). All rooms will be open as well as the shop, toilets and walled garden, however the café will remain closed in order to follow social distancing requirements.

The Design Museum will partially open to the public again from Friday 31 July, allowing visitors to see their temporary exhibition ‘Electronic: From Kraftwerk to The Chemical Brothers’. In addition to tickets being booked in advance of visiting, they will also be timed with a maximum of 1 hour 30 minutes. Face coverings are also compulsory and they advise bringing your own headphones to enjoy the multi-media elements.

The Natural History Museum will be welcoming visitors again from Wednesday 5 August. They will be closed every Monday and Tuesday, and open on Wednesday to Sunday from 11am to 6pm with last entry at 5pm.

The V&A will be re-opening the following day, on Thursday 6 August. They will operating with reduced opening hours and open on Thursday to Sunday from 11am until 3pm, and then increasing opening hours from 27 August when they will be open Thursday to Sunday from 11am until 7pm.

The Science Museum will also be open again from Wednesday 19 August, daily from 10am until 6pm, offering access to Wonderlab: The Equinor Gallery exploring how science and maths shape our everyday lives and Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries showcasing 3,000 medical objects and related commissioned artworks.

Image: The Great Gallery © The Trustees of the Wallace Collection

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Pink Floyd ‘Their Mortal Remains’: V&A

Pink Floyd have sold over 250 million records worldwide since they were founded in 1965, so it only makes sense for such an epic band be recognised with an exhibition on a truly epic scale. The V&A have done just that with the current ‘Their Mortal Remains’ retrospective of the band, presenting an enormous archive of material, huge displays and large-scale installations, all accompanied by a legendary soundtrack! The exhibition takes you on a chronological journey from sixties London through to the present day via promotional posters and tickets, press images, backstage photographs, archived interviews and footage, band members’ original instruments and other ephemera. That said, there is a distinct focus on the 1970’s – arguably the bands’ creative apex – witnessing the release of ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’, ‘Wish You Were Here’, ‘Animals’ and ‘The Wall’ all in a six year period between 1973 and 1979. This period of ingenuity is recognised in the exhibition with full-scale reconstructions of Battersea Power Station accompanied by a floating pig and other inflatables commissioned by the band to accompany their tours of this era, as well as a huge reconstruction of ‘the wall’. The show then moves on to explore more contemporary incarnations; the 1980’s ‘Final Cut, 1990’s ‘Division Bell’ and final 2012 album ‘Endless River’ – and closes with a gig projected on all four walls of one enormous gallery space. As well as celebrating the music, it highlights the influence of other artistic mediums; from David Hockney and illustrator Peter Blake to animators Gerald Scarfe and Ian Eames. Moreover it emphasises the bands’ ambition to constantly challenge and create more imaginative live shows, as well as their collaboration with graphic designers Hipgnosis to create some of the most iconic album covers of all time. You’ll need to dedicate a good few hours to take the whole exhibition in, but I’d suggest making the time this summer before it closes in October.

For more information visit their website

The London Design Festival: Somerset House

Design districts (Clerkenwell, Shoreditch, Chelsea, Brompton, Islington and Bankside), temporary installations, large-scale fairs, and hundreds of talks and events popped up across London last week to celebrate the city’s annual Design Festival. After lack lustre RIBA installations in flagship store windows along Regent Street and a frustrating visit to the V&A involving disorganisation, poor signage, a map with the wrong orientation, and long queues when you finally did locate a related room – Somerset House provided a welcome change and was extremely satisfying. It was easy to navigate, the central courtyard contained clear signage with arrows directing visitors to different areas, and actively encouraged public engagement and interaction. Although not strictly part of the festival, Marc Quinn’s ‘Frozen Waves, Broken Sublimes’ sculptures currently inhabiting the courtyard are certainly worth a mention, comprising five monumental stainless steel pieces including a 7.5 metre long wave and four conch shells. Moving into the Terrace Rooms six ‘#Powered by Tweets’ competition winners were on display, each challenged to create something beautiful or solve a problem using Twitter. Given my cynicism towards social media I was surprised by how thoughtful the entries were; one design equipped pigeons with pollution monitors enabling real-time tweets to report on air quality in various global cities, another harnessed Twitter to create visual mindscapes to help relax patients receiving chemotherapy, whilst another monitored language to create a real-time visualisation of the most popular words being used on Twitter. On the subject of communication technology, Punkt in the West Wing also touted their MP01 mobile which refreshingly contains no status updates, notifications or multiple alerts but instead “focusses on the things that matter, like communicating”! Finally, the sunken Embankment Galleries showcased ‘My Grandfather’s Tree’ where Max Lamb beautifully explained his story of felling an ash on his family farm which was cut into 130 sections, each transformed into a stool, table or chair, and all displayed homogenously.

For more information on the festival visit their website

The Alice Look: V&A Museum of Childhood

On my way home from a frustrating meeting with my estate agent and surveyor on Saturday afternoon, I passed the V&A Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green and decided that a step back into my childhood and the alluring world created by Lewis Caroll would be the best antidote for my adulthood frustrations. I have been curiouser and curiouser to visit ‘The Alice Look’ exhibition since it opened on 2nd May and it was just the escapism I needed… split into 4 categories comprising Alice in Wonderland’s beginnings, follower of fashion, inspiration and global Alice, it explores Alice’s relationship with fashion since her inception 150 years ago. As a lifelong fan of these books, I was surprised to learn it was Lewis Caroll himself who created the first images of Alice in a handwritten manuscript that he produced for the real ‘Alice’ (Alice Lidell – the daughter of a family friend) minus the pinafore, striped stockings and hairband we now automatically associate with the character. In the first published version she continued to be dressed in a yellow outfit worn by many middle-class Victorian children, and it was not until Through the Looking Glass was published 6 years later that she gained her hairband and stockings. And she wasn’t dressed in blue – the colour most widely associated with her – until the Disney animation in 1951! The exhibition goes on to look at the various reprints and special editions over the last century and a half, her influence on designers, stylists and photographers, as well as her various incarnations across the globe including Swahili Alice in a local kanga dress, and a Japanese Lolita-style Alice. My only criticism is that it could and indeed should have been larger, calling five or six display cases an exhibition is a little misleading and I was left craving more.

For more information visit their website

 

Alexander McQueen’s Savage Beauty: V&A

The V&A’s current blockbuster exhibition ‘Savage Beauty’ closes with Alexander Mc Queen’s own words;  I’m going to take you on journeys you’ve never dreamed were possible” which summarises what this exhibition has managed to achieve nicely. It is a lesson in how to take the museum visitor on a journey (when you’ve got a budget!) and immerse them in a world from Savage Beauty through to every form of Romantic (Gothic, Primitive, Nationalistic, Exotic and Natural), with a ‘Cabinet of fashion Curiosities’ and the designers vivid interpretation of Plato’s Atlantis thrown in for good measure. Each room not only showcases different collections but captures an entire mood; red, black, leather and lace from collections with evocative titles like ‘Nihilism’ and ‘Highland Rape’ immerse the visitor in Savage Beauty, a corridor of skulls and bones leads the visitor into a tribal space inhabited by mannequins with perspex tusks dressed in horse-hair and pony-skin with real crocodile heads used as shoulder pads, and expertly showcases a collection titled ‘It’s a Jungle Out There’, whilst futuristic silver horned mannequins on a white tile floor adorned with digitally created graphic prints and blaring techno music pay homage to Mc Queens last fully realised collection ‘Plato’s Atlantis’. The almost overwhelming double-height ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ focusses on the designers one-off pieces and with so many elaborate creations displayed side-by-side it is difficult for the visitor to know where to begin let alone maintain attention on one item without your eyes wondering. Clever use of Mc Queens own words to describe his collections and mirrors allowing visitors to view his expert tailoring from every angle make it a poignant tribute of one the UK’S most visionary and rebellious talents – and I’d highly recommend  a visit!

For more information visit their website