Fun Friday - The Geffrye Museum

I spent my Fun Friday morning at the Geffrye Museum which is a museum of the home.  I'll cut right to the chase - I loved it.  

 I battled the morning commuters on the tube north of Shoreditch and walked up the busy urban street. As soon as you step into the courtyard you are in a little oasis.  The museum is mostly set up in a very linear time line  - you enter at one end of this long building and go through a series of rooms decorated in different time periods.  Each representing a typical London middle class home for that time.

 I knew I was in for a good time when this was in the entrance.  Did you know the lava lamp is 51 years old??

 Did you ever give much thought to the evolution of the chair? 

 It was so interesting to read about how the structure of homes in London evolved over several hundred years.  As we all learned last Fun Friday, many of the homes in London were timber but were destroyed in the Great Fire in 1666.  So that is why the homes after that date are all stone and brick.  Plumbing is another obvious change over the years.  But houses were also influenced by the fact that most merchants and business men did business in their homes in those early days.  Servants were more integrated in to the house hold in the 1600's but over time the servants' rooms were moved farther away from the family (usually under the attic eaves) and they stopped eating meals with the family.

 The museum did a great job of putting the houses into the context of their time period.  I always like these timelines that tell you how Jane Austen was writing at the same time that slavery was abolished in England and that trains were still 30 years away.

 I love the blue room of 1830 as much as I love the 1890's room below which is representing the Aesthetic Movement.  This was happening in parallel with the mainstream Victorian decorating that I would have expected to see for 1890.  Could we do that blue tile around our unfinished fireplace at home?  

Change moves a lot faster once you hit the 20th century.  

 1910's

 1930's

1960's.  This is where my lifetime kicks in.  Can you look at this room and not think Brady Bunch???

 While the first 300 years of tableaus were in actual rooms, the 20th century was built into this more modern area.  There were several groups of school children at the museum doing drawings of the rooms and learning about things a family might do at home before they invented TV.

I had just enough time to hit the shop and then get back to my own home to start work.