In a row of old almshouses on Kingsland Road, a free museum asks what home means and does not dodge the awkward parts
Four Hundred Years of Living Rooms: A Visit to the Museum of the Home
Kingsland Road is not a restful street. It is a long, straight, noisy run of buses, kebab shops, Vietnamese restaurants and bars, heading north from Shoreditch as the Romans laid it out. Then, quite suddenly, the buildings fall back and there is a wide lawn shaded by plane trees. Behind it stands a long, low range of brick almshouses with a chapel at the centre, calm as a country churchyard. People eat their sandwiches on the grass. The traffic seems to lower its voice.
This is the Museum of the Home, known for most of its life as the Geffrye Museum. Admission is free. It is devoted to a subject that every one of us is an expert in, namely how people live indoors, and I think it is among the most quietly absorbing museums in London.
The Almshouses
The buildings date from 1714. They were put up by the Ironmongers’ Company, one of the old livery companies of the City, with money left by Sir Robert Geffrye, a merchant who had been Master of the company and Lord Mayor of London. They provided homes for around fifty poor pensioners, most of them widows of ironmongers.
At that time the site lay among market gardens outside the town. Over the next two centuries London swallowed it. By 1900 the district was densely built, poor and dominated by a single trade. The Ironmongers moved their pensioners to healthier air in the country, and the almshouses were bought by the London County Council, which wanted to save the gardens as an open space in a neighbourhood that had almost none.
A Museum for the Furniture Makers
The trade in question was furniture. Shoreditch and Hoxton were for a century the centre of furniture making in Britain. Curtain Road was lined with showrooms and warehouses, and the streets behind were full of small workshops where cabinet makers, carvers, turners, polishers and upholsterers each did one stage of the work. You can still read the old trade names painted high on the brick.
When the museum opened in 1914, its purpose was practical. It was to show fine furniture and woodwork so that local craftsmen and apprentices could study good design. In the 1930s an imaginative curator rearranged the displays as a sequence of furnished rooms, each showing a middle-class London parlour or living room of a different period, and aimed it squarely at schoolchildren. That is the form it has kept.
Walking Through Time
The rooms are the heart of the visit. You begin in a hall of 1630, with oak panelling and rush matting, and walk forward through the centuries. There is a parlour of the 1690s, a drawing room of the 1870s crowded with ornaments and aspidistras, a flat of the 1930s, a room from 1976 with a certain colour of carpet that will give some visitors a start, and a loft conversion of the late 1990s that already looks like history.
What makes it affecting is the ordinariness. These are not palace interiors. They are the rooms of merchants, clerks and professionals, people of the middling sort. You notice when the fireplace stops being the focus and the television takes over. You notice the arrival of the sofa, of the gramophone, of the fitted carpet. The more recent rooms have been reworked to reflect a wider range of Londoners, among them a Caribbean family’s front room of the 1970s and a shared flat of the present day.
The Rebuilding
The museum closed for several years for a major redevelopment and reopened in 2021 under its new name. The work opened up the lower floor of the almshouses, which had been storage, to create galleries exploring what home means: comfort and drudgery, privacy and overcrowding, belonging and homelessness. A new entrance was made at the back, directly opposite Hoxton station on the Overground, which could hardly be more convenient.
The gardens are a second museum. Behind the buildings a series of period plots runs from a Tudor knot garden to a contemporary green roof, with a walled herb garden beside them. On a summer afternoon it is one of the pleasantest spots in the East End, and remarkably few people know of it. Opening times and exhibitions are listed on the Museum of the Home website.
The Statue
There is a matter the museum has had to face, and it would be wrong to leave it out. In a niche above the chapel door stands a statue of Sir Robert Geffrye. He made part of his fortune from the transatlantic slave trade, through investment in the Royal African Company and the East India Company and through part-ownership of a slave ship. The almshouses were built with that wealth.
In 2020, amid a national argument over such monuments, the museum held a public consultation, and most of those who responded favoured taking the statue down. The board decided to keep it in place, with an explanation, after the government of the day made clear its view that contested heritage should be retained and explained. That decision was fiercely criticised by local people and by Hackney’s elected representatives. The museum’s position has shifted since, and it has said it wishes to move the statue to a less prominent place where its history can be told properly.
The building is listed, so any change requires consent, and the guidance of Historic England on contested monuments bears on the case. I think the museum was slow, and I think it is now at least honest about where its founder’s money came from. The question of what to do with the physical object is harder than either side likes to admit. A museum about home is, at any rate, a fitting place to discuss who was denied one.
Why Go
I send every visitor here, and they always come back surprised. There is no single treasure and no blockbuster. There is only the slow recognition, room after room, of how people like us arranged their chairs, and how much of what we take to be natural in a home is fashion.
It is also a reminder of what this district was. The furniture trade has all but gone from Shoreditch, its workshops turned into flats and offices, and the borough of Hackney is a very different place. The museum was founded to serve the people who made the chairs, and it is still free for their descendants to walk in.
Allow two hours. Have tea in the cafe. Then go back out to Kingsland Road and choose among forty kinds of noodle. Readers in need of amusement can turn to the British Onion pages or to The Daily Mash, and those curious about how my colleagues assemble such things should see how to run a satirical website. Their living room, I can report, belongs in a museum too. More of my local reporting is on my author page at The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
