A May Day visit: Brighton Morris Men and the Sussex Loops

On 1^st May this year, the Brighton Morris Men interrupted their May Day celebrations to come to Brighton Museum & Art Gallery and view one of our ‘Sussex Loops’.

A Sussex Loop is a finely crafted bracelet or armlet made about 3,500 years ago from a thick bronze rod which was bent double, forming a loop at one end, and then bent round into an ‘O’ form with the ends of the rod fitting back into the loop.

Sussex Loop

So far 32 Loops have been found, all within the South Downs/Weald area and all but two within 16 miles of Brighton. As none have been discovered outside this area, they would appear to be the work of a nearby craftsman or workshop and must have had some sort of local significance, perhaps a badge of honour for a Bronze Age tribe living in or around Brighton. What seems strange is that they are generally found buried in pairs or threes (although five were uncovered recently as part of the Near Lewes Hoard) and, in a number of cases, they form part of a larger Bronze Age Hoard – buried with other items of Bronze Age jewellery and weaponry, some of which appear to have been made on the Continent.

Brighton Morris Men dance programme

The fact that they are buried in groups and sometimes with other precious objects could well indicate that there was a specific ritual purpose to their burial. It therefore seems apt that the Brighton Morris Men, who have adopted the Sussex Loop as their logo, spent May Day celebrating an ancient ritual that heralds the arrival of spring and the beginning of summer, and which dates from our long-distant past.

Andy Maxted, Curator (Collections Projects)

Down In The Tunnels

“You see down at the bottom of that shaft there, right? Yeah, just there. Biggest rat I ever saw in my life, it’s down there right now. Dead. But it’s huge.”

The workman holds his hands up apart like he’s saying he caught an enormous fish. “This big, I swear.”

Senior Keeper Tim Thearle, who is in charge of conserving all these historic buildings, including the work being done in the Royal Pavilion Gardens, nods his head in agreement. He saw it too.

This week I was lucky enough to join Tim’s (very rare, months in the persuading) internal staff-only guided walk along the secret tunnel that links the north end of the Royal Pavilion to the basement of Brighton Dome, going right underneath the Royal Pavilion Gardens.

One section is scaffolded.

None of it’s really safe yet but most of it feels exactly like I’d imagined; ancient air, uneven tread, with alcoves for artworks or (more likely) lighting.

Along the length there are five vertical shafts from the ceiling poking up 3-4 feet to the surface, which would’ve let in air and light. Originally these had round glass tops and in fact, just a few centimetres down in one of the flowerbeds in the gardens, one of these original shafts remains untouched.

The Dome was George IV’s ridiculously luxurious stables; horses living in far greater comfort than many local people, housed in a circle around the edge of the main dome building, with a common area in the middle. So the Dome is older than the Royal Pavilion – he built the stables first. Apart from bringing mistresses in and out through the tunnel, George also used it to go between the two buildings incognito, after he got so fat he was embarrassed to be seen by his subjects. Everything is connected in this town – our grubby seaside party atmosphere entirely inspired by our time as host for errant triple-x, heavy banquetting royalty. By the time George gave up on Brighton and retreated to a shack in the gardens of Windsor Castle, he was obese, gout-ridden and surrounded by his exotic pets, not long from death.

Currently you can’t exit both ends – even if you walk all the way to the Dome end, it’s still locked: I snuck downstairs at the Dome end to get this dim pic of their entrance. Dome staff store their bikes in the entranceway.

The ultimate goal (obviously) is to enable public tours down this tunnel. However, quite apart from making it structurally safe and protecting the tunnel itself long-term, they also need to figure out logistics of how to let people in, since neither exit is anywhere near a public area of Dome or Royal Pavilion buildings.

I’ve been obsessing about tunnels since I first arrived. Here’s my first photo (from a few weeks back) of when it was first revealed from above by renovation work. Even though it’s obvious – with hindsight – what this is, I loved that it’s not marked and many people are walking by this repair work every day with no idea what they’re looking at. I’m so glad I stumbled on it by chance, rather than being told by experts.

They’ve now added layers of protective polystyrene and soft pipe covering, as well as a side wall to help take the load (big trucks park in this area because of concerts and productions in The Dome)… and today it’s all been waterproofed as well.

When they finish working on this section, they’ll dig up the next section – nearer to the Royal Pavilion – and continue until they’ve preserved the whole lot.

Chris T-T, Blogger in Residence

Chilled to the Bone

How many ice ages have there been in Earth’s past? Would you expect Britain to be hot or cold during an ice age? And just how big is a mammoth or a cave bear? With our latest exhibition – Chilled to the Bone – at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery we answer these questions and more.

The exhibition came about through a desire to show more of our archaeological collections as well as presenting some of our natural history collections held at the Booth to a wider audience in the centre of town. A new gallery called the Spotlight Gallery has been built on the upper floor of the Brighton Museum in the area previously occupied by the Body Gallery. This space has been designed to be a flexible space with large scale display cabinets suitable for a wide variety of collections, and used to showcase objects from the Brighton Museum collections.

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An initial plan for a Piltdown Man exhibition to tie in with the 100^th anniversary of the hoax was discounted due to a lack of material and a clash with a similar exhibition at the Natural History Museum, London. The idea was expanded to include an exhibition on ice ages throughout Earth’s history and on the archaeological discoveries resulting from a Victorian desire to learn more about these stages in our planet’s past, and how humans evolved. This Victorian ‘Bone Rush’ would also include the Piltdown fraud as one of the major events of Sussex archaeology. The exhibition also focuses particularly on the environment of Sussex during the most recent ice age, as well as Sussex archaeology and the search for human origins.

The design and construction of the exhibition was carried out by a small team working with a very limited budget. An additional challenge was that for much of the design stage of the exhibition, the cases were yet to be built. So mock ups were laid out in order to get a general idea of the look of each case and how well things fitted into the space.

The layout of the gallery is such that it was required to be as non-linear as possible as visitors can enter from three different directions, negating a start and end point. As such the intro panel is repeated at both ends of the gallery and each cabinet is built around a theme which should not require the visitor to have read text in a different cabinet before hand.

A welcome addition was an interactive program developed as part of a separate digital project. ‘Chilled to the Bone’ worked as a suitable test bed for the quiz program and allowed us to have a large scale projection and digital interactive that was otherwise out of our budget. The AV section sits alongside an activity wall and handling object to provide an uncluttered and entertaining ‘hands on’ area.

Huge thanks to everyone who worked on the design and installation of the gallery.

Lee Ismail, Curator of Natural Sciences