Tower Bridge in London, seen from somehwat upriver (on London Bridge, though London Bridge isn't visible). In front of it, and to the right, is HMS Belfast, and there are other boats on the river. Some glass buildings, include the old London City Hall, line the right-hand bank, while the buildings on the left are predominantly concrete. The river is a murky brown, beneath a sky with almost complete cloud cover; a small patch of blue persists on the right of the image.

Welcome to the London Borough of…, part VIII

Last time: I found a cow. It was a nice cow. Also some more borough signs, I guess.

My goodness, I am tired. I’m writing this after a day with train journeys out-of-proportion in length to the sleep I got either side of them, and before yet another train journey later today (the day before publication). So please excuse me if this post is unusually short, or unusually nonsensical. But it has been three weeks since my last instalment of the series about the London borough signs, and that seems to be the interval on which I’m posting them, so it’s time for another.

After finding the Hackney sign, and after a morning-to-early-afternoon of traipsing around suburbs, I decided to do something interesting with the remainder of the day. Specifically, I was near Hoxton, whose Overground station is right next to the Museum of the Home,1 the last of the national museums in London that I’d never been to. It’s one I think of as one of the more obscure ones, along with the Horniman and Sir John Soane’s Museum; it’s been open under that name since 2021, so you might have heard of it as the “Geffrye Museum”, which was its name for most of its existence to date.

If I tell you that Sir Robert Geffrye was (among other things) a slave trader, you might be able to guess why it was renamed… but it seems you’d be wrong.2 The rename came in 2019 while the museum was closed for refurbishment, and was therefore a little before the wave of renamings that followed 2020’s George Floyd protests. There was already controversy about the name but, according to a story from the time, the change “does not seem to be linked to” it. Instead, it was more related to two other facts: that the old name didn’t make it clear what the museum was about; and that the museum didn’t, in fact, have anything to do with the man. He funded the construction, but as almshouses and not as a museum, and it is for that reason that his statue is on the outside of it. The museum’s position is that it would like to move the statue to a less prominent position, pending planning permission; the status quo is that it remains, with a ground-level plaque for contextualisation.3

A collection of vintage home entertainment devices in a museum. On a black plinth on the ground are: a white television with two aerials sticking out of the top symmetrically, and buttons and a speaker on a silver recessed panel to the right of the screen; a teleivision with a small screen in a fairly tall wooden cabinet, with knobs, a tuning pointer, and a grille all below the screen; and a wood-and-metal hifi system, with a turntable and main control unit flanked by two speakers. On separate wall shelves are: a wooden radio with a small tuning dial and two knobs; a black-and-silver record player; a white plastic clock radio; and a small wooden television. The walls are painted dark teal, and projected onto the back one is an old black-and-white photograph of a family sitting around a small television. There is also a black speaker on the back wall, though this doesn't seem to be an exhibit.
A display of home entertainment devices.
A room decorated as it might have been in 1630. There is wood panelling on all the visible walls, and a window on the left wall in six panels with diamond-shaped leading on the glass, partially obscured by a plain green curtain. On the back wall are hung a tapestry to the left of the fireplace, and a painting to the right; the fireplace itself is lined with brick, and there are sick plates on the mantlepiece. In front and to the left of the fire is a dark wooden dining table and chairs, with a book and some metal plates arranged on it. To the right of the fireplace are a print in a plain wooden frame (leaning against the mantlepiece) and two wooden cabinets. The one against the side wall has a green cloth over its top, on which are placed two yellow-metal candlesticks, a yellow-metal plate, and a pottery jar. The floor is of bare floorboards, covered under the dining table by a straw-like woven mat. The foreground reveals that this is a museum: the room is separated from a pathway by a wire held by plain metal poles, and there is a sign describing the room. In front of the poles is plain carpet, leading to a plain doorframe cut through the panelling which leads through the museum.
The room from 1630.
A view into a room set up almost like a stage set; three walls are decorated, and we look into the room through a large window that takes up all but the very edges of the fourth wall. The room is decorated with a striped brown patterned wallpaper. Many photographs, pictures and nick-nacks are hung from the walls, and there is lace curtain over the doors at the back left of the room. There are wooden cabinets on the back and right walls of the room, with the left wal having a TV against the wall. All are filled with items; the room looks busy but not untidy. Two brown sofas are arranged near the television, with pieces of white lace draped over the backs as headrests, and over the arms as armrests. The three on the left-hand sofa show two cats, a peacock, and another two cats. There is a bunch of pink and purple flowers in a green vase on the coffee table. The carpet is dark red, with a pattern in brighter red and light brown.
The room from 1976.
A view across a grassed square in a city, towards a large, imposting building made of Portland stone. The building is domnated by a large, stocky tower. There is a recessed archway in the front of the tower, in which there is a nude statue of a man pointing upwards and to the right. There are columns on either side of the tower, flanked by other sculptures, and there are two flagpoles either side placed on a slightly lower roof. Below, there is a grand entrance, with doors on either side of and between four Corinthian columns, each door having large windows above it on the two higher floors. Ariund the building are other Portland stone buildings, mostly masked by trees, and some modern glass buildings can be seen rising above in the background. In the foreground, on the grassed area, there is an area on the left surrounded by low falls, next to which a flagpole flies the Red Ensign. The sky is overcast and moody.
Former offices of the Port of London Authority, now a hotel.
Tower Bridge in London, seen from somehwat upriver (on London Bridge, though London Bridge isn't visible). In front of it, and to the right, is HMS Belfast, and there are other boats on the river. Some glass buildings, include the old London City Hall, line the right-hand bank, while the buildings on the left are predominantly concrete. The river is a murky brown, beneath a sky with almost complete cloud cover; a small patch of blue persists on the right of the image.
Tower Bridge, from London Bridge.
The bank of a river, viewed from the opposite bank. The bank is straight on to the camera. To the left is a garden, with trees visible; next to it is a three-storey yellow-brick house, four window-bays across, with arched sash windows on the ground floor and rectangular ones above. To the right of that, in turn, is a six-storey building made of yellow brick, and six window-bays across. There are three painted signs on the walls of the building which identify it as "Oliver's Wharf". The ground floor has very small windows, and looks like it was once used for landing boats. Above that, the second and fifth columns of windows are slightly recessed, and have red-painted Juliet balconies. There is then a more plain five-storey brick building to the right, slightly recessed. A modern high-rise building rises in the background. The river is choppy and grey; the sky is mostly cloudy.
Looking across the Thames from Rotherhithe.

Anyway, the museum. I really wish I’d written this at the time, because as at previous points in this series I’m struggling to remember some of the details. What I do remember of the museum is that it’s in two parts, the first of which shows domestic items from ages past, grouped by theme (entertainment, say, or dining). Once you’ve passed through that, you move to the museum’s pièce de résistance, the Rooms Through Time. This, as the name suggests, shows rooms decorated, furnished and (for want of a better word) accessorised as if they were from different decades, presented in chronological order. The main comment I’d have on them would be that they reflected an overwhelmingly white and middle-class version of British life—perhaps defensible for some of the earlier rooms, where our evidence of typical home objects from other groups was more limited, but certainly not by the point the visitor reaches the twentieth century. For example, as far as I recall, their room representing 1976 was the only one where the notional residents were Black, and (as far as I recall) that was the only room where (implicitly or explicitly) a non-white perspective was being presented.

Did you notice my tense shift there? Another problem with writing this now is that, not long after I visited, the rooms representing later periods—which, as I understand it, had not been substantially changed when the museum was redeveloped—were substantially redisplayed, with a view to providing a more diverse range of examples. I’d love to comment on the success or otherwise of this, but I can’t because I haven’t been back since. Really this is all very unsatisfying, for which I apologise, but I did warn you at the start that this wouldn’t be one of my higher-quality posts.

Let’s move swiftly on to the borough signs before I run completely out of steam, shall we? After the museum, I took the Overground to Shadwell, then the DLR to Tower Gateway. Now, you might remember that, early on in this series, I complained repeatedly about how hot it was. Well, I should have been careful what I wished for. Because I arrived at Tower Gateway station into a hideous downpour.4 I loitered in the foyer for a while, then donned a waterproof and braved the rain. Tower Hamlets, tick.

A selfie of the blog's author, who looks impassively at the camera. His hair is slightly messy; he is weirding a dark blue raincoat, and the strap of a backpack can be seen. Behind him is a sign that depicts a silhouette skyline of Tower Hamlets (including Tower Bridge and Canary Wharf); the silhouette is blue on a white background. Above that the sign says "Welcome to" in blue, and then "Tower Hamlets" in red. Behind that again, and to the left, there is a tree rising above the sign. The rest of the background is sky, which is overcast.
Nothing says “hamlets” like a world-famous bridge and some skyscrapers.

And then I walked to, and crossed, London Bridge. Southwark, tick.

A selfie of the blog's author, looming over the camera. Behind him is a red sign in two panels, which is attached to a lamppost. The sign has an arched top, but the sides are then vertical and the bottom horizontal. The upper part of the sign says, in white text, "Welcome to BOROUGH & BANKSIDE". The lower panel, which is also white-on-red, shows the Southwark Council logo; this has the word "Southwark" as if handwritten, with a very large S that descends well below the other letters. Those other letters are underlined with a curved line, which ends with a separate dot. Below and to the right, the word "Council" is printed in a sans-serif font. Below the logo is the Southwark council web address. The sign is surrounded by a curved tube of metal following the outline of the sign from the bottom left, over the arch, and to the top-right corner, where it stops at the lamppost. The lamppost also has a small white-on-blue "End of bus lane" sign on it, and the circular downward-facing light can just be seen at the top of the lamppost. Next to the lamppost is another signpost, with the "No left turn" sign and a supplementary plaque that says "Except buses, taxis and cycles. Behind all of this can be seen some small parts of glass-walled high-rise buildings, and a cloudy sky.
I swear the various councils must have got a job-lot of these curved signs. At least this one mixes it up by awkwardly abutting a lamppost.

Then I went to meet my husband in the Rotherhithe area. I’d tell you about the rest of the weekend in London, but there were no un-bagged borough signs to be found. So I guess you’ll have to wait another three weeks for more London content, when the hunt continues. And when hopefully I’m less exhausted.

To be continued…

London borough count: 24/33
London borough count without cheating: 23/30

  1. I don’t think it’s ever abbreviated to “MotH”, but I wish it were. ↩︎
  2. As was I, until I looked it up for this post. As, indeed, was the Google “AI Overview”. ↩︎
  3. This status is curiously similar to that of a certain Oxford college with which I may have been previously associated. ↩︎
  4. I don’t really understand how I was unprepared for this, because Shadwell is one stop away from Tower Gateway. I assume the rainstorm came on very suddenly, but I also assume I was an idiot who didn’t notice the looming clouds. ↩︎

2 responses to “Welcome to the London Borough of…, part VIII”

  1. Welcome to the London Borough of…, part VII – Escaping Oxford

    […] To be continued… […]

    Reply
  2. Welcome to the London Borough of…, part IX – Escaping Oxford

    […] Last time: I went to the Museum of the Home, and only got two more borough signs. Slacking, really. […]

    Reply

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