Off to London... (part 2)

On my second day in the big city I ventured to Hoxton on the Overground, to go and visit the Geffrye Museum. Described as a museum of homes and gardens, the Geffrye is based around a series of period rooms, ordered chronologically to show how people’s living spaces changed over time. In recent years, these indoor rooms have been complemented with corresponding garden rooms, coving much the same time period.

Things I learned about the Geffrye Museum.

1.      No picnics allowed. The period gardens are seen as very much part of the museum, to be treated and experienced in the same way. Unlike in other (larger) museum gardens, this is not a place to run and play, but to stroll and look, just as you would inside.

The eighteenth century garden

2.      BUT the front lawn is used, and is intended to be, as a social space. Here people (not just museum visitors) gather to sunbathe, chat, eat, play.

3.      It is this green space, rather than the eighteenth century almshouses that the museum is housed in, that saved the site from being demolished. In the early twentieth century the residents were moved out of the almshouses and the area was destined for being built on to provide housing, but the Metropolitan Gardens Association argued that the green space was very important for the local area and community, and it was saved.

4.      The indoor rooms are created from probate inventories, looking at existing rooms, and trying to re-create a generic room from the period. The collecting policy is based around this research. They are not re-created real rooms, but a general idea. The principle is the same in the gardens, they are not reconstructions of a garden that existed, not measured out like London gardens, but the available space is used to interpret the styles of the times.

The herb garden, with Hoxton station in the background. The museum garden provide a little haven in such a busy urban area.

5.      The mixed veg soup in the cafe is full of mushrooms. I do not like mushrooms, I cannot even make myself eat them when I’m trying to be a grown up. The waiter gave me a very strange look when I explained this to him when he came to take away my bowl, empty apart from a pile of carefully avoided mushrooms!

Off to London... (part one)

Last week I went on a very exciting (and quite scary) trip to London, to do some research for my dissertation. If everything goes to plan, my paper will be on restored, and recreated historic gardens attached to museums or heritage sites, and the relationship between the inside and outside space. I want to look at the interpretation (information panels, audio guides, books and leaflets) in period gardens compared to in period rooms, how they gardens have been created, and how the visitors experience them.

So, to get me started on this I went to investigate two possible case studies, Hampton Court Palace and the Geffrye Museum. Terry Gough, head of gardens and estates for the Historic Royal Palace (Hampton Court, Kensington, Kew and the Tower of London) had very kindly agreed to talk to me, so Hampton Court was my first stop.

I spent the morning wandering around in a bit of a daze, trying very hard to think intellectual thoughts about the garden and work out what I was going to ask Mr Gough after lunch, but mostly all I could think was ‘these flowers are pretty’ and ‘OMG Henry VIII actually walked in this actual garden, OMG’. Not very intellectual. I did have a good look round though, and took lots of photos.

The Great Fountain

The baroque side of the palace, build under Willam and Mary in the late 17th century

The Pond Garden (used to be a Pond, now it's a Garden)

After forcing down a sandwich, and feeling a bit (very) sick and nervous about trying to sound clever whilst talking to a very important head gardener of lots of very important gardens, I went to the reception and pretended to be a grown up, whilst feeling like an imposter. ‘Hello, I’ve got an appointment with Terry Gough at half past two’ *big fake smile*. The lady on the desk was convinced though, and Terry came to meet me and showed me to his office. He was really friendly and nice, made me a cup of tea, and talked to me for nearly two and a half hours, answering most of the questions in my notebook before I’d even asked them, and lots more besides that I hadn’t even thought of. Here’s just a little sample of some of the interesting things I learned...

1.       What these words I keep throwing around – restored, reconstructed, recreated – actually mean in practise. Restored = using the only the original fabric of what was there before, just tidying up and polishing it to restore it to its original glory. Reconstructed = making from new materials an exact copy (or as close as is possibly possible) of what is known to have been there before. Recreated = making from new materials and new design, but in the style of what is known or can be surmised to have been there before. So that cleared that one up.

2.       The Privy Garden at Hampton Court is a reconstructed garden, based on amazingly clear archaeological evidence of the early eighteenth century garden. When William III wanted a new design for the garden he could see out of his bedroom (and drawing room, and state room, and dining room, and music room, and library, and closet) windows the whole area was lowered and lengthened, thus destroying any evidence of what was there before. The ground was taken down to the level of the gravel (the Thames is literally at the bottom of the garden) so the areas to be filed with soil to make flowerbeds had to be dug out of the gravel. When archaeologists in the 1990s removed the layers of soil, they found a perfect imprint of the layout of the 1702 garden in the gravel.

The reconstructed King's Privy Garden, much as it was in 1702.

3.       It’s not just me that was frustrated by all the ‘don’t walk on the grass’ signs, and even padlocks on some of the gates. Some areas, especially the pond gardens, are very much

treated as works of art, with a ‘look and don’t touch’ attitude.

Visitors have commented on this, and have been listened to, and as a result the next big project for the Hampton Court gardeners is a ‘magic garden’, an area where children and families can play and learn and let off steam. Not an adventure playground, definitely a garden, but one more accessible, interactive and sensory that the more formal historic areas. Hampton Court, if you are listening, I would VERY much like to come and work for you on this!