Josef Frank Patterns Furniture Painting at Fashion and Textile Museum

It was not much of a loose end but I had a few hours to fill between theatre appointments in Shoreditch and so I made another visit to the Fashion and Textile Museum (FTM) in Bermondsey, a short hop on the Northern Line from Old Street to London Bridge with a refreshing walk at either end.

Any visit to a museum starts or ends with a coffee and some cake. This time it started that way.

All I knew about Josef Frank beforehand was what FTM had shown me in their regular emails which was enough to tempt me to the exhibition but did little to inform me about the man or his works so I went in with some expectations and a lot of curiosity.

I soon earned that Josef Frank was Austrian by birth but moved to Sweden in middle-age to escape anti-Jewish persecution where is work in architecture extended to other forms of design.

Those expectations were quickly met too with large displays of fabrics in the style of the poster. The scale of the patterns with their large repeats and their lack of symmetry made them quite different from the floral patterns that I was familiar with from the likes of William Morris and Liberty. Somewhere along the line I remembered that I had some Ikea chairs with a pattern not unlike these, perhaps it a Scandinavian style.

Upstairs was something of a surprise as it was mostly paintings. Frank liked painting but was not terribly good at it, his cars looked very amateurish and his sense of perspective was unusual. That said, he often painted interesting scenes and their natural beauty and interest survived his artistic interpretation.

The paintings and other displays were interesting but it was the fabrics and furnishings that made the show special for me and there were lots of them to enjoy even in the relatively small space that is the FTM. I had to walk past them all again as I came back downstairs to leave and I enjoyed seeing them the second time almost as much as I had the first. It was a slow and pleasant exit.

The FTM is a remarkable place simply because it continually does exhibitions as stimulating this one.

Missoni Art Colour exhibition at the Fashion and Textile Museum

My sister was staying with me in London for a couple of days and I suggested a few things that we might fill the days with and while she was not so keen on going to the theatre she was interested in the Missoni exhibition at the Fashion and Textile Museum because she had not been there before and had three Missoni scarves.

Getting there was fairly straightforward but slowish; a bus to Richmond passing through some road works, a bit of a wait for a train to Waterloo, a trek across the station to the Jubilee Line to get to London Bridge and a final walk under railway lines in Bermondsey to get to the museum.

After that minor ordeal we started off in the cafe where I had a fruit juice called something like a Zesty Zandra and a toasted goat's cheese sandwich. All very nice if a little pricey at the best part of £10. It did the job and I was refreshed and ready for the exhibition.

My Art Card gave me a 50% discount for the exhibition so I only paid £4.50 to get in. That was good value however you look at it and even better when compared to the lunch.

I do not own any Missoni scarves so I went in with few preconceptions, the only clue I had on what to expect was the poster above with its bars of different colours. I had seen similar samples at the Sonia Delaunay exhibition at Tate Modern and I had been intrigued, and impressed, by the careful planning of colours and how they work together.

It came as a surprise that the exhibition began with some pictures, i.e. proper art. They were there to explain the context of the Missoni work in fashion by showing how similar themes were being explored in mainstream art. This started in the '50s when abstract art with its reliance on shape and colour was becoming more prominent, though it had started a few decades earlier. One reason that fashion had lagged behind painting was that fashion is generally more conservative and another is that, as one of the videos explained, the technology was simply not there. In Missoni's early days machines could only weave stripes and the more complex ideas appearing in art could simply not be copied.

The extent to which this was experimental was shown by the many sheets of paper where colours and patterns were carefully tested.

I had seen similar experimental work by artists at other exhibitions and I love the way that they show the artist's working out of things such as which colours go well with others. Here as well as a multitude of colours there were simple patterns and next to them more complex ones where the straight lines of triangles had been bent into experimental curves.

The importance of this design phase in the work is shown by the exhibitions logo (at the top) which consisted of coloured lines and made no reference to the fabric made using them.

These geometric designs featured throughout the exhibition and were most notable in the collection of wall hangings in the main room.

A small section of one of these is shown below. It is an almost ridiculous collection of lines and colours that combine to make something striking. This was a very large piece overall and looked as though it belonged on the stairway of a grand mansion. It certainly needed somewhere the size of the main room to contain it, let alone to show it off fairly.

The main element in the main room was a collection of mannequins (below). This was a clever display but it took me most of the afternoon to work out how clever. It is not that obvious from this angle (that is my excuse) but the mannequins were dressed in stripes of colours that ran diagonally from bottom-left to top-right. The orange mannequins are the best clue and the stripe in front of them is green. These stripes were obvious, once spotted, from the right angle on the ground floor.

It also took me a while to work out that the lighting that I complained about was part of the effect and different elements of the display were lit in a cycle as a clock ticked somewhere in the background. Once I realised this all I had to do was wait for the phase when all the lights were on to take my picture.

What did surprise me was how timid most of the colours were and because of that how subdued most of the garments were. It took some close inspection to identify some outfits that looked sensible in today's eyes. One of these was the checked coat worn by the mannequin with the blue hat at the top-right of the collection.

There were other rooms and other things to see. There were some videos running on continuous loops, some carpets that looked rather like ones that I grew up with and more paintings by contemporary artists. It was not a vast exhibition, he Fashion and Textile Museum is not a big place, but there was plenty to see and much of it warranted spending some time looking at, particularly in the detail of the patterns and the colours used.

I return to another sample sheet for my final image. These samples are in fabric rather than paint and the patterns are more complex which shows how much the ideas and technology evolved. I could find somewhere in my house for this particular display even though it is just a collection of samples as the combination of shapes and colours is arresting. I returned to this display several times.

While I have never been that interested in fashion (as my wardrobe testifies) a well curated exhibition will always interest me, much as In our Time does whatever Melvyn Bragg is discussing, and I found plenty to stimulate and entertain me in Missoni Art Colour.

A Taste of Honeysett at the Cartoon Museum

I was aware of the A Taste of Honeysett exhibition at the Cartoon Museum and was trying to find the time to see it when technology came to my rescue.

I was working in the London office on a Friday afternoon when we suddenly lost all communications, telephone and computer network. After half an hour or so it became clear that they were not coming back and so there was no point staying in the office unable to work. So I went out.

The Cartoon Museum is about twenty minutes walk away and so this was the ideal opportunity to go there.

I had been a Honeysett fan for many years. As a young lad I used to read all the cartoons in Punch and it was the Honeysett ones that made the biggest impact, I can still remember the double page spread on doctors holding their surgeries in pubs which included a drawing of a doctor lying on the floor and the nurse informing the waiting room that he was now only seeing foot disorders. Similarly there was one with two old men in a pub talking about a third who was lying on the floor unconscious. This was before a drinking competition and one of the men said to the other that he was surprised that the third man had collapsed so quickly as he had done well in the lunchtime practise session.

Admission is normally a paltry £7 but I got in for free with my ArtFund card. The Honeysett exhibition was on the ground floor with the usual exhibition upstairs.

The Cartoon Museum has an enlightened view of photography and bans close-ups as they infringe copyright but allows general shots, like this one, that give a general view of the galleries. From this you can see that it was, unsurprisingly, full of cartoons.

It was not a large rooms but the addition of a few partitions created more wall space and there were a lot of cartoons to look at. Of course cartoons cannot just be looked at, they need to be read and I read every one of them which took me the best part of an hour.

Like the cartoons that I remembered from Punch they were mostly of domestic situations, the one at the top (this is the cover of the exhibition catalogue) was typical, though politics did sneak in sometimes. There was one political cartoon that I would have photographed if allowed and that was a large coloured work commenting on the way that free capital was ripping up the Japanese landscape to build inappropriate skyscrapers. Where Japan led London is following.

The Cartoon Museum is a lovely place for anybody interested in comics or cartoons and I really should go there more often. I'll make even more of an effort to do so when they put on exhibitions as good as A Taste of Honeysett.

Liberty in Fashion exhibition at the Fashion and Textile Museum

I had not heard of the Fashion and Textile Museum before, otherwise I might well have paid it a visit, and once again I had the Art Fund iOS app for alerting me to it. It remains my main source of information about exhibitions that are on and this time it told me about Liberty in Fashion. Anybody who knows me remotely well will know that is an exhibition that I wanted to see.

National Rail had other ideas and closed the main line from Richmond at Clapham Junction and so another popular app of mine, CityMapper, advised me to take the District Line to Monument and walk from there. So I did.

That walk took me over London Bridge, through the redeveloped area around More London and then under the grimy railway arches in upper Bermondsey. The area got markedly better as I moved south along Bermondsey Street with some trendy cafes and craft shops appearing.

I was expecting the museum to be easy to find as my limited research (on the day) told me that it was a bright orange building in the Morocco style but it played a trick on me. The building is set back slightly from the usual building line thus hiding the orange frontage. What I could see from some distance was the pink entrance but I was not expecting that so it was a nice surprise to suddenly find myself there.

A lesser surprise was to find a cafe there, it is just to the right of picture, which is where I had a late lunch of a vegetarian quiche and two salads from a choice of four. It was a tasty treat and I hope that it was not responsible for the severe tummy troubles the next day.

The Art Fund helped again when I bought my ticket, giving me a 50% discount, so I paid just £4.50.

The museum is an unusual space and the exhibition was strung along several rooms on two floors. The layout of the rooms meant that it was hard to see the full extend of the exhibition (perhaps I should have accepted one of the guides!) and that added to the delight as each new display was a surprise.

The exhibition was a broadly chronological display concentrating on the fashion themes of each period and the main creators working with them for Liberty at that time. It was like walking through the Liberty shop as it moved through history, a pleasure doubled.

The final room, at least on the route that I took through the exhibition, was the study room that had displays of the original fabrics rather than clothes made from them. It was in that room that I took the pictures of the Bauhaus curtains above and the fabric samples below.

My parents had Bauhaus curtains in the front room when I was a teenager though that was in a less brash colour-way with more brown and less yellow. I have a tie that matches it.

The clothes on display in the rest of the rooms and corridors were mostly top-end fashion items, which is understandable as even the basic Liberty items, like shirts and ties, are not the clothes of everyday wear for most people. As a long-time Liberty wearer I sometimes forget that.

Obviously a lot of the clothes looked painfully dated, just because of their age, but that was always down to the cut and not to the fabric. So while this dress very much is of its time it is still easy to appreciate the way that touches of Ianthe have been woven into it and how well the jacket compliments it.

There were dozens of outfits to look at lovingly,  mostly dresses with a few jackets for me. There were a couple of outfits that I would have loved to have, and would have worn today despite their age. I particularly liked one with a Nehru collar, I had looked for something like that in India but had failed to find anything close. Luckily enough I am quite happy with my generous collection of Liberty shirts and ties.

When I bought my ticket I asked the friendly woman on the desk how long it would take to get around the exhibition and she advised that it would take about half an hour. On my way out a full hour later I was able to tell her how much I had loved it.

The Fabric of India and more at the V&A

There are those exhibitions that I chance upon, those are normally in small art galleries that I discover when walking, and there are a few that I make a determined point of seeing, many of which are on at the Victoria and Albert Museum, probably my favourite place.

The Fabric of India was something that I wanted to see as a coda to my holiday in India in November and also because I like exhibitions at the V&A even when they are on things that I do not know that I am interested in, things like wedding dresses.

Any visit I make to the V&A includes at least some time walking the main galleries for no particular purpose other than to discover, or rediscover, some of the many interesting things there.

This time I started of in the galleries covering recent English history (intentional) before drifting off into ceramics (unintentional). One of the pleasant quirky things about the V&A is its layout (partially caused by the way it has been added to) and so I got from the English gallery on the fourth floor to the ceramics on the sixth (with no fifth along the way) via an almost hidden staircase in the middle of one of the galleries.

The porcelain galleries ran across the long frontage of the V&A and, starting at the west end, the first two rooms had deep shelves running from floor to ceiling that were absolutely stuffed with all sorts of stuff from the useful to the decorative to the pointless.

Here there were more teapots than anybody could ever want. There may have been some changes as I am pretty sure that there was a pile of just red teapots last time that I was up there, or perhaps they were somewhere else.

Moving east I came to the main stairwell next to the Cromwell Road entrance and I think that is far as I went the last time so continuing into the east wing may well have been a first for me. Here the emphasis changed from household objects, cups and ornaments etc., to decorative pieces.

The first to catch my eye was this full-sized picture of a woman painted on tiles (above). I had to trim this picture a little as there was a south-facing window behind it which confused the camera and I did not have time to wait for the sun to move around.

In the final gallery was the biggest and best surprise which confirmed everything that I thought about the magic of the V&A.

In a display of plates based on the famous Willow Pattern there were two based on popular computer games, including this one based on Pokémon Yellow a 1998 Game Boy game. I recognised Snorlax immediately.

From there another half-hidden staircase took me down into the architecture section. I often go there on purpose so I was quite happy to find myself there by accident. Most of the displays were the same as last time, as far as I could tell, but there are always temporary exhibitions in a small side room and this time it was on Phillip Webb who worked with William Morris. I like looking at plans of buildings and these were nice plans to look at.

Another of my rules on visiting the V&A is to make at least one trip to the cafe.

This was Christmas week and it looked as though everybody else in London had the same plan and I had to queue for a while to get my curry (on the menu on account of the India exhibitions) then to pay for it and then to find a table. But it all worked out in the end.

Being packed meant sharing a table and I spent some time talking to a couple from Melbourne who were heading off to the Spain the next day with little idea of what their itinerary was, they were not even sure which airport they were flying to though it sounded like Seville.

The curry was followed by a coffee and some cake (more queueing but not quite as bad) and then I was ready for Fabric of India.

This was in the main exhibition space which meant that it would be a long session but I had plenty of time to take it steadily. Being the main exhibition meant that there was a bog book to sell and that meant lots of people around to stop photographs being taken. I expected that and was ready for it but after I had seen everything (it would not matter if they threw me out then) I went back to the beginning partially just to make sure that I had not missed anything (I had) and to take a picture if I could.

The thing I missed was very early on, due a crown of people in the area, was a small room covered in colourful wall hangings. There was a seat for a guard in it but he was away at the time (he came back soon after) and so I took the one picture that I wanted.

What I had also missed on the first time round due to the crowds was the bit explaining why the fabric trade grew up in India in the first place (cloth and dyes). Reading about that on the second time around helped the rest of it to make more sense.

The main message from this starting point was the constant flow of trade and ideas both east and west. Two examples of this were the import of designs from Persia and the export of chintz dresses to the UK where they caused a commentator to remark that it was becoming hard to tell a servant from a lady.

The centre piece of the exhibition was a large tent from around 1750 decorated with large floral patterns and a bench in the middle to sit and appreciate it. Elsewhere there were clothes of all kind, including some very cute outfits for small children and some modern reimaginings of classic themes, and more hangings. Most of it was dyed by hand using wooden presses, as I had seen done in Jaipur, but there was some needlework too.

It was a bold colourful assault on the senses which I was delighted to wallow in for an hour and a half. The V&A does this sort of thing rather well.

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at the V&A had lots of stunning outfits but little information about them

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty was one of those blockbuster exhibitions that every arty person was obliged to see and so many arty people wanted to see it that extra evening and night sessions were added. It was one of those evening sessions that allowed me to see the show less than a week before it closed.

The V&A closed for the evening as usual at 5:45pm and then opened just for the exhibition at 6pm. That sounds simple enough until I missed the bit, which I am sure they told me, about which entrance to use. I tried the main entrance, the tunnel entrance and the Exhibition Road entrance before finding the Secretarial Entrance (staff only) beyond the main entrance. I found it with a good five minutes to go before my 6:30pm entrance time.

There were fewer people than I expected queueing up given that it was sold out. I suspect that the V&A were letting fewer people in than they had for other exhibitions as it was busy all the way around but never as busy as David Bowie is ... had been. Having slightly fewer people in made it much easier to move around the exhibition and to get close enough to the texts to read them.

I had heard of Alexander McQueen, obviously, but apart from one or two outfits that had appeared in other exhibitions I really had little idea of his work so was looking forward to learning something new rather than, as I had with Bowie, seeing some old favourites.

The V&A obviously thought that it had something to live up to in showing us Alexander McQueen and it was quite arty itself, probably over so.

There was a room that looked like an ossuary with walls made from painted bones. There were words of wisdom from McQueen painted on the walls, much of the lighting seemed designed for dramatic effect rather than to highlight the clothes and we were teased with different music in each room.

Despite the best efforts of the exhibition to get in the way of the content, the outfits were dominant, as they should be. There were many of them arranged in themes which sometimes, but not always, equated to collections.

My simple summary was that I loved the outfits but not the accessories. We were told that many of these were designed just for catwalk shows and were never intended for sale but, even so, some of the constructions were just weird, like the metal frame holding knees and elbows (you try walking wearing that).

There was a lot of exaggeration in the outfits, collars that rose to eye height and beyond, shoulders that ballooned or spiked, and skirts fluffed about with vasts amount of fabric. There was a lot of attention to detail too with some exquisite embroidery, neat and unusual fastenings and everything tailored precisely to the mannequins.

What was missing was much of an explanation for what it all meant, how it had been made, how his career progressed or who his customers were. The room texts were general, e.g. telling us that he liked Victorian Gothic, and the costumer texts just gave the show, the year and the main materials used. I suspect that this was all very deliberate as the V&A had a hefty book to sell.

I would have liked more words but even without them the exhibition took me 90 minutes to get around because there were so many fine outfits to see. My favourites were the Japanese inspired collection and those at the very end where digital printing on silk produced some extraordinary patterns.

Wedding Dresses at the V&A

I will admit that wedding dresses is not the obvious thing for me to go and see an exhibition on but this was the V&A and they do exceedingly good exhibitions on fashion.

I had intended to go to see Wedding Dresses for many months, the exhibition started in May 14 and I knew that it was coming before then, but, predictably, I finally got to see it just two days before it closed in March 15.

I was in London for something else that morning and had taken a day's holiday to take in an exhibition in the afternoon before going to the theatre.

I got to the V&A at 1:30pm and joined the short queue for a timed ticket. The exhibition was clearly busy but was not sold out. I opted for a 2pm ticket to give me time for lunch in the cafe first. After a very leisurely lunch that featured some sort of butternut squash pie, I went in to the exhibition around 2:20pm expecting it to take about an hour which would leave me just about enough time to get to another exhibition at RIBA that was also due to close shortly.

The exhibition was busy but following the slow queue around the outer circle of the lower floor allowed me to see everything and in chronological order too. There were a few other men there, just not very many.

The displays were of typical wedding dresses of the middle class (mostly) and it was interesting to see how the shapes, styles and colours changed over the years. It was also interesting to learn that wedding dresses used to have a life after the big day, much like a smart lounge suit work by a bridegroom today has.

One of my favourite dresses on the lower level was a fairly simple purple dress that looked just like the sort of thing that one of the smart ladies in Lark Rise to Candleford would wear.

Upstairs was a completely different affair and introduced the exotic world of contemporary designed dresses many of which were worn by the rich and famous.

The first of these was the full purple dress worn by Dita Von Teese on her wedding to Marilyn Manson in 2005, as seen in the photo above. Photography was banned in the exhibition (they had a book to sell) but I was able to take this one from outside when sitting among the statues in the long corridor on the ground floor.

A few of the dresses were outrageous, one even upset the bridegroom because of its revealing nature, but most were very pretty and a few were just stunning.

The star of the show, in my opinion, was 'Flower Bomb designed by Ian Stuart which, conveniently, was at the back of the exhibition and so could be viewed clearly from the metalworks section on the first floor.

My objective measure of how much I like an exhibition is the amount of time I spent in there and for Wedding Dresses I expected to take an hour but took almost two. And given that it was not physically a very large exhibition that meant a lot of time looking at and reading about each dress.

The one disappointment that I had with the exhibition was the lack of context. I presumed that most of the examples on the lower floor were typical but those on the upper floor clearly were not so I left not knowing what wedding dresses look like today or what they cost. None of the exhibits had any prices on which surprised me.

It was a fairly exhausting two hours too so I had no option but to go back to the cafe for a pot of tea and the first scone of the season.

That the V&A could make wedding dresses so interesting to me is a testament to their curating skills and reinforced my determination to see more of the same, starting with Alexander McQueen which had just opened.

My last look at Ghent took me to museums and gardens

My last day in Ghent, a Tuesday, had to be a part-day as I was booked on the eurostar to catch at 6pm and that meant being back in Brussels around 5pm to allow time for the connection, a cup of coffee and some contingency.

That still left me with quite a few hours to play with and rather than wander the streets again I thought that I would go and see some things and I started with the City Museum (STAM). I chose this as I have generally found city museums (i.e. those that tell the history of the city) to be interesting and not too large to be daunting.

The museum was just the other side of the waterway that I had walked along on my first day in Ghent so it was both a short walk and easy to find.

I did, however, fail to find anything that looked like a decent cafe for my breakfast so I was delighted to find one at the museum itself. The section of the modern building with tables and chairs in the picture below was the cafe/restaurant and the rest of the new building and the old one behind it were part of the museum.

There was some sun that day, unlike the day before, and so it was good to get a table next to the large window overlooking the water. It reminded me, obviously, of the canteen at West Burton Power Station.

There was a set route through the museum and the first room was dedicated to a large model and satellite photograph of the city. The photograph was on the floor (it was all of the floor and part of one wall too) and I had to put on overshoes before going into the room.

The model was in the centre of the room and showed the city centre. The photograph started where the model ended and showed the rest of the city and its immediate environs.

The tall building half way down the left side of the model is the one that I photographed in its half demolished state. Rabot is just to the right of it and the castle is in the direction of 2 o'clock just before the small triangle of water. The heart of the old city is in the middle near the top and is distinguished by several tall buildings and the open spaces around them.

In contract, the section of the photograph that I have chosen shows the docks and is heavily industrial.

I like models and I like maps so I spent a lot of time in this room. A good start.

One thing that consistently confused me was that maps of Ghent were show with west at the top and I referred to my own map several times just to check this again (and again). The unusual orientation of the maps made some sense as the layout of the city best suited a landscape view and there may have been a historical reason for the choice; maps have not always had north at the top.

The rooms were laid out chronologically and each room had its own digital map of that period with options to zoom in and read details of the landmarks.

Ghent had an interesting political history having been part of many empires and countries, Belgium gained its independence as recently as 1830. Its importance waxed and waned too and there was something of a highpoint in 1500 when Charles V, who became Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, was born there.

Most of the exhibits covered the social side of history and showed how people lived. One room that I especially liked had hundreds of posters from the early twentieth century.  I could have chosen to share one of the Marx Brothers or something in the constructivist style but the beauty of art nouveaux won the day.

The museum seemed small, just fourteen modest rooms, with not much on display but this was deceptive and it took me a long time to get around it all, and I even deliberately avoided the separate exhibition that was on.

Part of the reason that it took so long to get around was because there were videos to watch and things to play with (as well as the interactive maps). One of my favourite toys was the virtual tour of an exhibition site. It covered a large area and the virtual tour went well beyond the gates. I had a happy time navigating out and then trying to find my way back to the centre again.

I was tempted to play with the Lego on the way out too but I was running short on time for the rough plan I had for the day. The next stage in that plan was to return to the museum cafe for a late lunch and a rest.

After lunch I walked east across the city to Citadelpark because I like parks and I had not been to one in Ghent yet.

I entered at the north-west corner and walked anti-clockwise, which was something of a mistake as the museum of modern art (S.M.A.K.) that I was looking for  was just a short distance away walking clockwise. I walked all the way around the park, which was a good thing to do, and then decided that I did not have enough time to see another museum, especially one that charged a noticeable entrance fee. If it had been free I would gave gone in for half an hour or so.

Instead I went to the botanical gardens situated next to the park on its south-east corner.

The botanical gardens were very modest when compared to Kew, as most botanical gardens that I have been to are, which was fine as I did not have that much time left before catching my train. It did have some nice greenhouses to walk through and so that is what I did.

It almost felt as if I was not meant to be there, despite all the welcoming signs saying the opposite, as there were so few people there and almost everybody else that I saw was working there. The advantage of the quietness was that I was able to take lots of photographs without having to worry about people spoiling them with their colourful clothes, something that is a persistent problem in Kew.

From the gardens it was a short walk back to Ghent station, via my hotel to collect my bag. The travel from there was easy and uneventful, not least because I had bought a eurostar ticket to/from any Belgian station. I even had time for one last coffee in the rather lovely cafe in Ghent station (the one next to Starbucks).

Ghent had surprised me and in a good way. I had thought that it might struggle to entertain me for the best part of four days and that I might have to seek pleasures in Antwerp but Ghent delivered the goods.

Welcome to the new Museum of Architecture at Kings Cross

Kings Cross keeps getting better. The canal was always nice, Kings Place is a good place to work, Central Saint Martin is an exciting venue and now these have been joined by the Museum of Architecture.

Actually, it may have been there for a while as it is well hidden and it was only the recent addition of a large sign pointing to it that told me that it was there. And I work just a few metres away.

The museum is part of the Filling Station complex that sits on the south side of the canal in the little space between Central Saint Martin and Kings Place. It was once a filling station in the petrol sense and now it fills workers with trendy snacks.

It is hidden from the busy road by an intriguing wall of corrugated plastic that is there to hide the busy road from its customers. That in itself is a bold architectural statement.

The museum is small is small, just a couple of rooms, but it manages to pack a lot of punch in to that space. The current exhibition, Vertical Urban Factory, looks at the changing role of factories within our cities.

The display in the first room has a history of factories and their relationship with people and places. So, for example, it shows when some major new technologies were introduced, when significant factories were built and important changes in labour relationships, e.g. strikes. Each theme has its own colour to make the interwoven stories easier to follow.

The second room explores some of the ideas about factory design and illustrates this with examples. It also starts to look at the future and how new mixed complexes are being built.

There is a lot of detail there and that make it a rich place to delve into. It also means that a second visit will be worth while and I will be sure to make one before the exhibition closes in September.

The waterside location and unexpected discovery reminded me of the ARCAM Architecture Centre in Amsterdam, and that was a good thing to be reminded of.

The Museum of Architecture is a very welcome addition to the area. I hope that it likes it there and stays for a long time.

Trekking to William Morris Gallery and Lloyd Park

I love the works of William Morris and examples of his designs can be found among my shirts, ties, mugs and gardening tools.

This is a passion that I share with many people which is why his works are on display across the London in both permanent and temporary exhibitions. In recent years I have made Morris pilgrimages to Two Temple Place and Kelmscott House.

Somehow, though, I had never been to William Morris Gallery before.

The main reason for that is because the Gallery is in one of William Morris' former home in Walthamstow (E17) which is the other side of London, which made getting there an interesting challenge.

Guided by an app on my iPhone I took the London Overground to Gospell Oak when I changed lines to get to Blackhorse Road and then a bus. (Admittedly the first bus went the wrong way and I had to cross the road at the first stop and swap buses.) I was pleasantly surprised at how pretty the area looked with plenty of parks and water. That was not the image that places like Tottenham Hale conjured up for me.

The William Morris Gallery was in another park. Lloyd Park was originally the estate that went with the house when this part of London was semi-rural and inhabited by rich people working in London. Rich people like William Morris' father who rented the house for a while.

The new extension on the far left of the house is a cafe and this is where I started my tour. I did not have much time to do everything, I got there around 3pm and it closed at 5pm, so I made just a fleeting foray in to the garden.

It may have been called the William Morris Gallery but it was more of a museum than a gallery and it had far fewer works on display than Two Temple Place had. That was OK with me as I like museums as much as I like galleries.

The museum covered both the man and his methods and covered both well. There was a lot of interesting stuff to read, but that does not make for interesting photos so I've chosen ones that show the works and, in some, tried to capture something of the essence of the museum too.

Palace Green was one of William Morris' early commissions and the display described the scope of the project, the approach adopted and had samples of the work. The background to the commissioning and design were interesting and helped to explain the final result.

I could not resist a close-up of Strawberry Theif, a pattern that appears on several of my things, including a favourite short that I still wear desipte the ravages of wear and sunshine.

There were plenty of other designs on show and also words, pictures and videos showing how they were made.

Morris' personal and business lives were interweaved through the museum and I learned much about both. This included little things like how he traveled between his country home and studio is Hammersmith by boat as well as the changes that gradually led to taking over the company that he helped to form, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., and how it then took just his name.

Another room explored his links with Socialism, which was an important part of his life. At the core was his wish to see good design everywhere, not just in the houses of the rich.

Morris worked in many areas, all of which were covered in the museum. In his day he was most knows for his books. These included his poetry, translations of North European sagas and an illustrated version of Chaucer.

I had to squeeze another coffee (and more cake) in before leaving so I rushed a little through the museum but in just over an hour I had done it justice. I could not leave without a memento so I bought myself a tie on the way out. I can always do with another pretty tie.

LIKE 54: A tour of the Old Operating Theatre Museum

The London Information and Knowledge Exchange (LIKE) mixes in a few socials with its calendar of talks and I often find these as instructive as the (slightly) more formal events. There is usually an information and knowledge sharing aspect to the socials and I learned a lot from our visit to The Old Operating Theatre Museum.

The first thing that I learned was that the museum existed. I knew the area around London Bridge reasonably well having worked nearby and having socialised there many times. The frontage of the museum is small and nondescript so even knowing that it was there and actively looking for it I still managed to miss it the first time.

From the plain entrance one of the tightest spiral staircases that I have ever climbed took me up to the business part of the museum where other LIKErs were already gathered. Wine was offered and duly accepted.

We were then led into the operating theatre next door where our smartly dressed guide was ready to tell us the fascinating history of the oldest operating theatre in Europe (but no longer in active use).

We stood around the steep horseshoe as medics looking to learn had done almost two hundred years ago.

Then there were no anaesthetics or antibiotic and so surgery was a pretty brutal affair, though it was successful enough to continue as a practice.

The main way to reduce pain was to act swiftly and Martin was used to demonstrate techniques for cutting the flesh away so that a bone saw could be used to amputate the leg. The best that the Martins of the time could do was to bite down on a rag and it was not uncommon for patients to die from the shock.

In one of the more grim tales we were told how one surgeon had managed to kill three people in one operation, which had proved to be something of a career-limiting move.

Our guide was knowledgeable, fluent and entertaining. The tales came pouring out far to fast for me to note and I made the wise choice just to listen rather than miss something by truing to write at the same time. The one note that I did take was that Samuel Pepys had had a bladder stone the size of a tennis ball removed.

Having had our heads filled with medical history and some minor horror stories we went back to the herb garret to look at all the medical items on display there.

I had had enough of body parts and sharp objects by then so I took pictures that I found aesthetically pleasing rather ones with medical interest. That is why there are lots of bottles in my selection and no saws.

This was a social so after the tour we went to a pub and, given where we were, The George Inn was the obvious choice. This had already been there for a hundred years when the operating theatre opened.

It was raining when we got there, for which nobody had come prepared, so the hordes that would normally have been in the large courtyard were all inside. Despite that we managed to get served and to find a place to stand that was not too much in the way.

Eventually the rain stopped and lots of people went outside freeing up a table and some chairs so that we could sit and eat as well as drink. The chunky chips with dips were very popular. We never eat or drink in silence and the conversations flowed smoothly and richly.

And then we wandered home. It was another good LIKE event and I hope to go to many more like it.