Museum of the Home, after its major redesign in 2021, reopens with a highly inventive development: Rooms Through Time: 1878-2049. Now visitors can explore seven new houses across the time period, houses which reflect the evolving community of East London from Jewish migrants pre-WW1 through Caribbean, Irish and first-generation British Vietnamese. Houses or rooms? The Museum’s clever design gives us a sense of a slice of a house – we might glimpse a kitchen beyond the main space, see for ourselves the sanitary arrangements (always fascinating!), and deduce there’s another bedroom just beyond the door.
Beyond this, Rooms Through Time introduces us to the occupants of each living space, giving them identities and stories. The tenement building of 1910, for example, imagines a Jewish tailor and his wife getting ready for Friday night supper: the table is laid ready, a freshly baked challah as the centrepiece. And there’s so much else besides the visual. The co-curators have moved away from worthy information panels, offering information in varied ways. There is written information, certainly, on small displays and portable paddles. But there are also unexpected soundscapes. Recorded oral accounts can be heard when you stand under an upturned bathtub hanging from the ceiling in the Jewish apartment. In the 1878 Townhouse, we hear Bunoo, an Indian ayah, singing a lullaby to the children in her care.
The new occupants of the 1956 A Room Upstairs are imagined as a newly married Irish couple, about to set off for an evening at the Galtymore Dancehall. Her ironed dress lies ready on the bed, her strappy shoes toppled over on the lino. Above all the mood of Museum of the Home is celebratory, inviting us to relish the delights of these new, improved spaces for London’s growing and diverse population. The Irish couple’s room is as far away from the cliched Irish misery memoir as you could imagine. This is a couple enjoying the new freedoms of life in London. They’ve a radio and is that a little Hoover under the bed?
The 70s terraced house is full of its Caribbean owners’ possessions. Apparently, visitors continue to gift handmade crochet items to the museum: in pride of place is a particularly wonderful tea-cosy in the shape of a pineapple. We notice that the television has replaced the fireplace as the sitting room’s focus, this one playing clips from Empire Road, the first black soap opera.
One of the best things about these new spaces is the imaginative design. After consultation with the community, the Museum responded to requests that visitors be allowed to get closer to all the tempting objects on show. This has resulted in a simple, but effective redrawing of the display space. Where ropes once kept us firmly on the outside, now they are reconfigured to create large rectangular spaces inside the rooms which you are encouraged to step into. This is properly immersive curation.
And you can wander outside too. The rooms are linked by a changing streetscape that allows you to peer inside windows and inspect small outdoor spaces. Where the original rooms of the Museum’s magnificent eighteenth-century almshouse are side by side, stretched along the lengthy corridor, those in Rooms Through Time spiral off, creating an enticing elliptical space. At the start is a small, appealing visitor room, complete with plush pebbles to sit on, with animated, impressionistic views of Hackney washing over its curved walls. In fact, throughout this new section, there are all sorts of comfortable seats you are invited to use – there’s not a minatory National Trust pinecone in sight.
There are more, so many more, delights to be seen, heard and experienced. And at the end, there’s the splendid shop and a wonderful café, the newly re-opened Molly’s. An imaginative, immersive experience from start to finish.
Opens 23 July 2024
