Up On The Roof

I felt curiously unmoved, staring out over Brighton from a new angle, standing on the roof of The Royal Pavilion, despite such beautiful crazy architecture, set off by bright sunshine and few clouds, making it a perfect morning to be mucking about up there.

Partly, we weren’t actually that high up, so the view itself was local rather than city-wide. More interesting was nosing through windows to see inside. Here’s a rare (and sadly blurry) view of the kitchen, seen from through the skylight. Several of these high windows have no way to open or close them, except to send a servant scurrying up onto the roof.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And you can’t really make it out in these photos but it was also possible to look down into a few other rooms, through lovely old coloured glass.

Nowadays, even most staff aren’t able to come out here, except on very rare occasions. It’s just not safe. And ultimately, even standing high on the roof, it is still far more striking to look up, not down.

Of course, the onions and towers of the Royal Pavilion are fundamentally illusion – facade – to be viewed from a distance; built onto and extended around a pre-existing (conventional) house. Stunning to see from down in the gardens or beyond, because they were designed that way: a building meant to create an unforgettable, iconic silhouette on the skyline, more than anything else.

Up here, they’re at a far more human-scale.

You can look at the joins and processes that plonked these follies on top of a normal(-ish) working building and you see the sheer effort required to keep it in decent nick, battling rain, wind, gulls, pigeons and the occasional human vandal.

Senior Keeper Tim Thearle (in the green jumper) brought a group of us up here and showed us around, explaining how they maintain the building. It’s a mammoth task.

Here is largest onion surface, viewed from inside.

Through a tiny wooden doorway, like something for Hobbits, we crawl inside the dusty bottom of the biggest onion, under the eaves that have held it up for close to 200 years.

Here there are piles of mostly wooden junk, some of which may be 80+ years old; pieces of carapace and decoration and ornament. Bits of abandoned history deemed not so important as the other bits, yet they’re equally historic.

During last winter pigeons got in here and it took months to get rid of them. There is nothing like piles of pigeon poo and abandoned decorative wood to humanise an iconic old building.

More International Visitors at the Booth Museum

The Booth Museum has had two international visitors this month on very different missions. Both were from North America, and both are studying for their Ph.D.s.

Caitlin Silberman

First we welcomed Caitlin Silberman from California, but studying for her doctorate in Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is in the early stages of writing a dissertation on birds and bird/human hybridity in Victorian British art, visual culture, and material culture. One of her chapters deals with bird taxidermy, and the Booth Museum is of course a prime source for nineteenth-century taxidermy. Caitlin looked at all our archives about Mr. Booth, his diaries, catalogues and paintings, as well of course as his splendid 4-volume publication ‘Rough notes on the birds observed during twenty-five years’ shooting and Collecting in the British Islands, 1881-1887.

Michelle Campbell

Only a week later, we were happy to be able to help Michelle Campbell in her quest for Chalk fossils of some early representatives of marine reptiles. Michelle is studying for her doctorate at the University of Alberta, though she originally comes from Ottawa. She is interested in how land-based reptiles made the leap into becoming fully marine in their habits. Michelle’s supervisor, Prof. Mike Caldwell first visited the Booth Museum in 1995 and discovered our rich collection of 85 million year old fossils which he studied and published on. Michelle is extending those studies.

We take a great deal of pleasure in the knowledge that we are able to help people as diverse as scientists and art historians advance their studies by using the collections in the Booth Museum.

John Cooper, Keeper of Natural Sciences

Unexpected Conversations

I’m loving the unexpected conversations I get into, during Thursday afternoons spent sitting here in the café. You probably won’t be surprised to know that I don’t get much actual writing done, even though the original (theoretical) plan was to use this slot to write up the week’s stuff. I’ve ended up writing mostly at home (where I eat too much and get distracted by Netflix or music-making) and sometimes on other weekdays in different Royal Pavilion & Museums cafés.

On the Thursdays though, I fall into conversations. Even when I decamped for a couple of weeks downstairs to the Dome foyer bar (because there was temporarily no wifi up here) it was the same; a collection of interesting people from out of nowhere and fascinating, bonkers topics.

I’m tapping away at the laptop when this dude comes up in a dark blue three-cornered hat, like a comedy Napoleon. It’s a modern approximation, not a replica. And in every other way he’s dressed normally, jeans and a tshirt. In fact, it was a British Sea Power band tshirt, I think, yet he’s got this funny-looking hat on and he’s smiling down at me. Then what we talk about is why the Royal Pavilion wasn’t built facing out to sea and what that means about George IV’s disinterest in nature, versus people.

No, nothing to do with his hat, which neither of us mention at any point.

At the launch event for the Murder In The Manor interactive website (of which more soon – click that link for joy if you have a spare 45 minutes and like mystery stories) I was intending to speak with the young writers from Little Green Pig who contributed the short stories to the project (I still will, hopefully), yet I ended up mostly in conversation with a woman doing a thesis on bodybuilding, who has now become obsessed with it; diving into the very sub culture she was studying.

You’d also be surprised (and I am very impressed) by the number of museum staff who can hold their own discussing American underground punk and metal.

And I loved chatting with Aurella Yussuf (@rellativity on Twitter), who was here working on the World Stories exhibition. We were supposed to discuss blogging itself but that got hijacked by a messy free-range conversation about race and gender in art history. Aurella has just launched her own blog and it’s terrific, well worth checking out her piece on the Turner nominees.

I’ve been interviewed several times about the residency. Three guys including my publisher friend Jonathan (@jonathas on Twitter) rocked up last week with a state-of-the-art movie quality camera and didn’t mind what I said, so I got to waffle on about the tunnel, standing right above it in the Pavilion Gardens.

I’m learning the surprising degree to which people take such different responses away from the museums. The extent to which they can be enchanted by one exhibition, or one group of objects, while completely overlooking (or actively disliking) other sections – and allow that to become a pattern. Like (and this really happens) when someone has been a Brighton Museum regular for years, then goes into the pottery section for the first time and realises those stories are just as interesting as, say, the fashion things they normally enjoy. They’ve spent years walking through one section and not another. I do it too, almost always ignoring one or two sections that I think I won’t find interesting. I’m almost certainly wrong.

I like that. I like seeing long-time friends, or long-time Brighton & Hove residents, walk into this space they’ve not visited before. They’ll always be back soon. And so I like the Thursday afternoon routine becoming the glue that holds together the variety and fluidity of the rest of the week. Especially if you’ve never been in Brighton Museum before, come say hello.

Chris T-T

 

Friends of Brighton History Centre

Kate Elms and I were relative newcomers to the History Centre, both joining the permanent staff in 2007 – Kate having previously worked there as a volunteer and I having worked elsewhere in Brighton Museum with the Curator responsible for Oral Histories.

Like Paul Jordan, when he first started with the original team under the management of Sally Blann, I remember feeling seriously intimidated by the sheer number of items in our collection and having a real sense of terror at the idea of being left on my own at the staff desk and being expected to answer anyone’s questions.

An early photograph of the reference library

Fortunately, our knowledge and our confidence increased over the years and that has been one of the joys of the job – always learning, always finding out more details and adding to our knowledge and again to our ability to really help the visitors to the Centre. Because it’s not just the beautiful room and the resources within it but it was the people who came that really made the History Centre something special.

A letter published in the 1920s complaining of draughts in the room

Although there have been  the obvious highlights like the media research we did for film and television and radio companies and our moment of glory on Who Do You Think You Are?, it was the visitors to the Centre we met in person who really gave meaning to our work. We had academics and historians, novelists and short story writers, journalists researching for various projects and students from PhD level studying rare books and pamphlets down to primary school children looking for that extra finishing touch for a homework project with an old image or a historic newspaper report. We’ve had sports enthusiasts trawling through the newspapers for match reports from a hundred years ago. We’ve supported and advised people with their family histories either helping to trace living relatives or sometimes unearthing hidden family secrets and tragedies in inquest reports and newspaper stories. I’ll never forget the woman who came from Brazil knowing that her grandmother had been in England at the beginning of the 20^th century but not knowing where, being moved to tears when we found her name in the recently released 1911 census, hidden away in a boarding school so far from home.

Paul, Shona & Kate

We’d like to thank all the people who came and who we were able to help and who gave us a real sense that our work was worthwhile and appreciated. Although it was wonderful to see our names mentioned in credits in books, for example, we also feel very proud that for some people the History Centre was just a place that they liked to come – to the full time carers getting an hour away from their responsibilities, for the people looking for a peaceful spot in a busy city. It’s been a privilege to meet you. So many of you have been true friends of the History Centre.

Shona Milton, Brighton History Centre

The Booth Museum Stars in a New Fossil Project!

The fossil collections at the Booth Museum are currently getting some attention they deserve! Two scientists from the British Geological Survey (BGS) are spending a week with us photographing some of our most important specimens.

Dr Michaela Contessi and Simon Harris

International science codes require that every species or subspecies of organism, whether living or fossil, should have a type or reference specimen to define its characteristic features. These specimens are held in museums and collections around the world and must be available for study. The Booth’s collection of fossil type specimens are available to scientists all over the world through a catalogue.

Many of the UK fossil species were defined over a century ago, and with time, the type specimens may have deteriorated or been lost, causing major problems.

The GB/3D type fossils online project, funded through the BGS by JISC (the Joint Information Science Committee), aims to develop a single database of the type specimens held in British collections, of fossil species and subspecies found in the UK, including links to photographs and a selection of 3D digital models.

The BGS is partnered by:

• National Museum Cardiff
• Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences
• Oxford University Museum of Natural History
• Geological Curators’ Group

Together they will develop a collaborative database of British type specimens.

The results will be made available through a single searchable web database. It will include links to view or download high quality images, stereo pairs (anaglyphs) and digital models.

This week Dr Michaela Contessi and Simon Harris are working on the fossils held at the Booth Museum, and they are writing a blog of their work which can be seen here

John Cooper, Keeper of Natural Sciences

50th anniversary of Max Miller’s death, 7th May 1963

On Bank Holiday Monday 6 May at 2pm, members of the Max Miller Appreciation Society gathered on Brighton seafront for the official opening of the MAX MILLER WALK in the company of Brighton & Hove’s Mayor & Mayoress and Michael Aspel OBE.

Max Miller Appreciation Society with the Mayor of Brighton and Michael Aspel

Michael Aspel unveiling Max Miller Walk

We were joined by members of the British Music Hall Society. 2013 is a special year for MMAS as it marks 50 years since Max died at his Burlington Street, Brighton home on 7th May 1963.

MMAS will be delighted to hear from anymore with stories or memories of Max in and around his home town of Brighton.

Our website is www.maxmiller.org

Jack Strutt

Podcast #1: The First Giraffe – featuring Alexandra Loske

Art historian and curator Alexandra Loske is researching her thesis and curating the upcoming Regency Colour exhibition. But she also uncovered the story that I’ve found perhaps most exciting so far.

If you know anything about my music, you may know I’ve had an obsession with giraffes for years – used them in songs, written about them and run photo streams of them. Meanwhile Alexandra, tasked with looking through a collection of old satirical cartoons, discovered several images of George IV including a giraffe, as if it was one of his toys. She started to research this and uncovered the first ever known giraffe in Britain, which was given to King George as a diplomatic gift by the Pasha of Egypt (the same fella who gave Britain the gift of Cleopatra’s Needle).

‘Twould puzzle a conjuror. Print, 1827.

I couldn’t pass it up. I interviewed Alexandra in the recently closed History Centre, to get her to tell this incredible story. It’s a doozy… for me, it felt like the best episode of In Our Time ever, although I do a horrible impression of Melvyn Bragg. What a way to kick off the podcasts.

Here’s a link to the audio podcast via Soundcloud. There will be more – and in the next few days I aim to publish podcasts to iTunes, which will enable you to subscribe – but I’m not quite there yet technically.

Chris T-T, Blogger in Residence