The working life of the Museum of London

Jon Cotton, Senior Curator (Prehistory) in the Early London History and Collections department of the Museum of London, talks about the Weather Permitting display at the Museum of London. You can see Weather Permitting at the Museum of London until Sunday 15 June 2008.

‘When two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather.’ Dr Samuel Johnson.

Why Weather Permitting at the Museum of London?
Try switching on your TV or radio or opening a newspaper without coming across the words ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’. The Museum is well placed to cast an historical eye on this topical question, although in putting the display together we deliberately made no attempt to present a thorough-going scientific analysis of climate change (we’re not meteorologists after all – or politicians for that matter). Instead our aim was to offer a well-grounded historical commentary on London’s weather, delivered with a light touch that focussed on the quirky and the downright strange. The display took the best part of six months to research, design and mount, and its successful delivery involved a wide range of people right across the Museum and beyond.

Display or Exhibition?
We’ve been careful to describe the show as a display, NOT an exhibition. The reason is simple: the space available within the Museum is currently limited. We do not want to raise more expectations than we can realistically deliver in the space. That said, we hope that there is plenty in Weather Permitting with which our visitors can engage.

What’s in the display then?
The display is split between the front foyer and the area outside the London before London gallery. Both are equally important. The front foyer incorporates various layers of information including a climate time-line that runs right to left back into the Ice Age, to highlight the cyclical nature of climate change. This is populated with individual weather events that aim for the ‘well I never’ response.

Contemporary quotes and quirky facts are supported by appropriate images and objects including costume in the large case to the left. A series of five free-standing displays in front of the time-line wall examine specific types of weather: HEAT; STORM; FLOOD; FOG; FREEZE.

Finally a listening-post contains a series of oral testimonies relating to various weather-related events such as the Westminster flood of 1928, the freezing winter of 1947 and so on.

The second main part of the display is in the London before London foyer around the corner. This provides a more contemplative space to show light-sensitive objects including a series of paintings that focus on how artists have recorded London’s weather in the past.

What’s been the response?
So far, reaction has been really positive: the first two weeks of the display coincided with school half term and the foyer was absolutely heaving. Families were spotted singing along to the weather songs and nursery rhymes, and enjoying the storytelling sessions. There’s been a down-side though – the interactives have taken a terrible battering. We’ve already gone through several thunderdrums and a range of fans while the weather lore disk will have to be redesigned to cope with the numbers wanting to use it. It looks as though we’ve been victims of our own success!

The press have picked up on the display too. Time Out have been particularly supportive, and even arranged a tie-in competition asking readers to name their all-time favourite top ten weather songs. (The winner got to hear some of his selections playing in the foyer too!)

My favourite bit of the display …?
I’m really fond of the pair of dainty silk shoes dating to c.1700 in the costume display case, and the painting of the cab horses in snow in the London before London foyer. (I also enjoyed drinking the contents of the bottle of English wine that forms part of the display – but that’s another story!) The whole team had a great time putting the music sound track together, and an appeal to other colleagues swiftly brought a deluge of replies. Everyone’s got their favourite song – for what it’s worth mine is When The Levee Breaks, a 1971 cover version by Led Zeppelin of a song originally written by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy following the disasterous Mississippi floods of 1927. Given the floods we had in parts of London last summer, this has a very contemporary edge …

Well, fancy that …

• John Evelyn’s 1661 tract Fumifugium: or the Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoake of London Dissipated was one of the first to draw attention to environmental problems in the capital.
• An earthquake at five-thirty in the morning of March 8 1750 threw a servant girl in Charterhouse Square from her bed, causing her to break her arm. Dogs howled ‘in uncommon tones’ and fish were seen to jump ‘half a yard above the water’.
• While watching late night TV Ron Langton was startled to find fish falling on the roof of his house in East Ham during a thunderstorm on May 26 1984. Other residents in nearby Canning Town experienced similar fish showers the same evening.

There are more photos from the development of the display and the final installation on Flickr.