The British Museum Archive
We arrived at the British Museum to tour the museum's archive and waited for our guide in the glass-topped Great Court. The awe-inspiring domed Reading Room is located at the center of the Great Court, but was currently closed for renovations. I had no idea where the archive was located in the museum and to my surprise we were led to the gift shop that surrounds the structure of the Reading Room, and were ushered through the doors in the photo below. Yes, museum visitors attempted to sneak in with our group, but were told it was a private tour. Well, we were greeted with the view in the photo at the top of this post. Incredible!!! So, the archive at the moment takes up a section of the Reading Room. In my head it was in a dark, dusty room in a lower level.
Once inside the Reading Room we officially met our guide, Francesca Hillier, Senior Archivist. Unfortunately for me, I could not hear most of what she said. The space in the Reading Room was not conducive to listening to a soft-spoken person and it had no air conditioning, so several fans were on making it even more difficult to hear. So, this account is based on the limited amount of information that I heard or Googled later.
So, the domed Reading Room at the British Museum was completed in 1857 and was inspired by the Pantheon in Rome. It went through some updates when the glass ceiling was installed around it for the Great Court, which was opened in 2000 by Queen Elizabeth II. The museum's archive houses the records of the museum's activities since it was founded in 1753. The goals of the archive are to maintain the history of the museum, the collections, and the people involved.
Francesca had pulled out numerous archival materials and displayed them along two long reading tables. Like I said, I could not always hear her, but I could view the items and put two & two together. So, above is a letter from Charles Darwin that refers to the terms for a donation of specimens. Below are pictures of pages from the log books for the Reading Room in which each person visiting had to sign. Notable is Karl Marx on the left and Oscar Wilde on the right.
Below are examples of approval forms needed for gaining admittance into the Reading Room from the 19th & 20th centuries. The form on the left was to admit Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes series, and on the right was for Mrs. Helen Beatrix Potter, most well-known for The Tale of Peter Rabbit and other animal tales.
All right, I became excited to see archival material about cats, as I have not spotted a single cat in London since arriving here two weeks ago. I’ve seen enough giant rats to last a lifetime—most notably lurking in the shadows of the Jack the Ripper tour—yet the London cat remains elusive. The picture on the left below reveals a letter about a well-known museum feline resident named "Mike" and a photograph of cats also in residence. However, by 1966, the resident cats were seen as a nuisance and efforts were made to get rid of them.
Finally, one of the coolest moments during the archive visit was watching a worker hoisted high into the vast expanse of the dome on a crane—a front-row seat to those ongoing renovations I mentioned earlier! I turned to one of my classmates and said "Well, you don't see that every day!" All around it was a unique experience.
Next up is the Houses of Parliament.
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