What is it?
Housed in a set of Grade I-listed eighteenth-century almshouses and formerly known as the Geffrye Museum after their patron, the merchant and slave trader Sir Robert Geffrye, this lovely little Hoxton museum has offered a vivid physical history of English home interiors for more than a century.
After an £18 million refurbishment that lasted two and a half years, the museum reopened in summer 2021 with 80 per cent more exhibition space, including two new galleries. Inside you’ll find displays featuring original furniture, paintings, textiles and decorative arts. The museum’s permanent ‘Rooms Through Time’ exhibits display a sequence of typical middle-class living rooms based on real London homes dating from 1600 to the present. There’s a Victorian parlour set up to host a séance, a drawing room from 1915 decorated in the Arts & Crafts style, a parlour from the 1790s, and a loft-style Shoreditch apartment owned by a gay couple in 1998. It’s an oddly interesting way to take in domestic history, with any number of intriguing details to catch your eye, from a bell jar of stuffed birds to a particular decorative flourish on a chair.
The museum also hosts temporary exhibitions and art installations, and stages daily guided tours, as well as an eclectic events programme encompassing family fun days, film screenings, craft markets, creative workshops and performances.
Why go?
To see a neat history of how the insides of our homes – and society – have transformed over the centuries.
Don’t miss:
The gorgeous gardens, which feature a little walled plot of herbs, as well as the ‘Gardens Through Time’ exhibit which displays a series of different gardens in various historical styles.
When to visit:
Tue-Sun from 10am to 5pm. Peak times are on Saturdays, bank holidays and during the school holidays.
Ticket info:
Free entry, some exhibitions are ticketed.
Time Out tip:
If you’re an interiors nerd like me, book a visit to the museum’s Collections Library. The behind-the-scenes space lets you access the museum archive and look at its collections more closely. You can request to see different museum objects and look at everything from books and manuscripts to photographs, archive material, oral history interviews and wallpaper and textile samples.
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