Museums and Harry Potter

Preface: If you clicked this link because you’re a Harry Potter fan and aren’t as big a fan of random museum musings, scroll down to the third subsection.

West End Museums

For our second to last Modern Art class, we were given a map to follow on an independent walking tour of five smaller West End galleries. Three of the museums were nice and thought provoking and the other two seemed to have the primary goal of seeing how many visitors they could shock into closing their eyes in horror and curling into the fetal position. 

I met Maggie and Kathinka on campus with time to spare for getting lost and we caught a train to Charring Cross Station where we started looking for the first museum. Actually, we were quickly sidetracked and started looking for Scotland Yard instead, which is where Harry and Mr. Weasley and took the phone booth entrance into the Ministry of Magic in the fifth movie and then Harry, Ron and Hermione snuck into the Ministry in the seventh movie, and found it quickly. After that though we did start looking for The Institution of Contemporary Arts (ICA). We found that less than a mile up The Mall from Buckingham Palace.

The Mall was designed in the early 1900s to be used for
major national ceremonies and processions, and is tinted
red so it loos like a red carpet leading to the Palace.

The ICA is in a huge, white columned building that seems to take up the entire street. We found the unassuming entrance, a simple glass door instead of the traditional grand entryway, and found that the first few rooms were sparsely decorated with minimalist, modern pieces. A lot of the 

paintings were more blank canvas than actual paint, and with some pieces it was difficult to tell where the art ended and the museum began. For example, with one piece you walked along the room like normal and then came to a short set of black stairs on your right. After climbing the stairs you realized they led nowhere but to a window, and you were actually standing in the middle of the art. In another section there were several sculptures that were little more than lumps of metal and clay presented on vertical metal poles. Each lump had a different shape, texture and title. While strange, the art at the ICA was still interesting, but we moved on after about twenty minutes so as to make sure that we had time to find the other four museums on our list.

We managed to find the aptly named white cube next, which was hidden (I mean hidden in the literal sense) in the middle of a courtyard formed by buildings that were all taller than the White Cube. We circled several times before discovering that we had to go through one of the near-hidden passageway tunnels formed between the buildings to get to the Cube.

The White Cube is a photography space and was my favorite museum from that day. There was a wide range of photographs, from a barren, rocky hill with scattered sheep to an artistic photo of a woman in a mirror that mimicked Manet’s painting, A Bar at the Flies-Bergere. I can look at photographs forever, but after about a half an hour we moved on once again, this time finding the branch of Hauser and Wirth in Piccadilly Circus.

To say I disliked this gallery is being kind. I did like it more than the branch on Seville Row though, but more for the Piccadilly location and the fact that the space itself is old and charming than for the art inside of it. The main piece was called The King, and took up the entire first room.

Once we entered, we took a spot on the pews facing an unfinished wooden stage and begin to soak in the weird that was all around us. Photographs of various naked women at strange angles were blown up and had been hung on the walls to the side, with a few odd photos of an old man’s face thrown into the mix. On the stage, elevated in all his obese, naked, hairy glory, is the figure that I can only assume was the king, sitting in a barber’s chair and surrounded by exposed wires, flickering fluorescent lights and trash. There was a giant photo of a black man behind him and more trash surrounded the bottom of the stage.

It was weird.

I stayed long enough to analyze it for my class before briefly slipping up and down the stairs to see the various affronts to the senses that were on offer on the top and basement floors before we moved on to find The Rifle Maker.

If Hauser and Wirth part one was an assault on the sense, The Rifle Maker was more like a cleansing massage. There was a lot of art that combined words and colored lights, some of the pieces rotated calmly, there were literature-inspired collages, but the best part was that there wasn’t a single old, naked man statue in the entire building.

The peace was not meant to last though, because we had to leave and find our final museum: the Seville Row branch of Hauser and Wirth. About a block from Seville Row we began to pass people who looked nauseated or disgusted. Some looked catatonic. I should have taken this as a warning.

We went inside though and heard a weird noise coming from the second room that sounded like pistons pumping. Confused, we followed the noise into the first gallery room, where I stayed for precisely five seconds before returning to the lobby. Let’s just say there was a mama pig, and there were baby pigs and a politician and the entire thing was huge and moved and the baby pigs and the man were…doing…something to the other pig…

Nope, I reject that as art. If you want to make disgusting, graphic political statements, don’t disguise them as art.

Before leaving we stopped in a very small room off the lobby where there was a very long video of people slowly covering a naked woman with plaster.

Yep, still werid.

 

Imperial War Museum (IWM)

I would rank the IWM as one of the best museums in London. Not only was the space itself amazing, but the exhibits were curated incredibly well, with a majority of the artifacts being really impressive stand-alone items as well.  

The first room is a large, high-ceilinged and has various tanks, planes, submarines, missiles and the like on display. After passing through this room, I climbed the stairs to the second floor where the exhibit I had come to see, The Children’s War, was being housed.

A lot of the exhibit space here was different than the wide-open museum set up that is more typical. It was as if the walls between smaller, narrow rooms had simply been knocked out to create several long rooms. This does make some amount of sense since the building used to house the infamous (now prestigious) Bethlem Hospital, better known as Bedlam to many people, and used to be made up of a lot of smaller rooms. 

(Side Note: While Bethlem Hospital is Europe’s oldest and longest running psychiatric hospital, it is more famous for the terrible conditions patients (called prisoners at the time) were held in for several hundred years and the fact that casual visitors were allowed to see the inmates like animals in a zoo. In fact, families often stopped by after church on Sunday to look at the strange patients. Bethlem Hospital wasn’t moved to the building where the London Branch of the IWM is now until the early 1800’s though, and public visiting was outlawed more than 150 years prior to the move, meaning this building is probably significantly less haunted than the previous ones.)

Tom Murphy made the cast bronze sculpture to
commemorate the more than 4,000 people who
had died between 1940 and 1942 in Liverpool
and Bootle. The oldest victim was over 90 and
the youngest victim was just one day old. 

Although The Children’s War covered a very broad topic, the pieces were each so personal and powerful that it didn’t feel very broad at all. At the beginning there was a simple white room with five photographs of people projected on the wall. Underneath the photos were short personal stories from each person about their experience as a child during World War II, and on the opposite wall was part of a twin sculpture of the one by The Church of Our Lady and Saint Nicholas in Liverpool. The IWM only had the little boy playing with the airplane part of the statue, but I enjoyed seeing him again.

I’m not used to getting so much specific information about each artifact in such broad exhibits. “This frock is similar to one children would have worn in London during the Blitz,” is more common, but in this exhibit pretty much every single item had a previous owner and story attached to it. The descriptions were more similar to: “This dress was worn by Emily Smith on the day she was evacuated from London and sent to live with the Long family in Plymouth. Her mother made the dress for her.” 

Frederick Baker's letter to Pat 

The letters on display were probably the most powerful artifacts in the exhibit.  Lance Corporal Frederick Baker wrote one letter in October 1942 to his young daughter Pat before he left for the front lines. It was three pages long and was to be given to her if he died. It told her how much he loved her and how he hoped she would grow up to be a good person and the things he wanted for her future. He finished the letter with a drawing of Pat and her brother that he sketched from memory. He died in the Dodecanese in November 1943 and she received the letter. 

Another letter written by a little girl who died when her evacuation ship to Canada was sunk by a German submarine. As the ship was under attack, some of the children were able to write letters to their parents and, unlike the children, the letters made it off the ship safely. In the letter she told her parents how much she loved them over and over and said she was sorry she wouldn’t see them again. Next to this letter was another one her parents had sent to her at the home where she would have been staying in Canada if she had made it. They were informed of their daughter's death a few days after sending the letter.

After the featured exhibit, I found the London Blitz experience. You start in a small bunker room, sitting on benches and you hear a tape of people talking and bombs falling. It’s dark and you have to be quiet, as if you were really in a World War II bomb shelter. The guide comes through once the bombing is over and leads you out onto the replica of a 1940’s London street. Rubble is everywhere, buildings are burning and you can hear people talking and screaming. The guide gives some statistics about what happened and how people dealt with the blitz, and then you are rereleased into the museum.

The experience was so realistic that it felt strange walking back into the museum. I continued up the stairs to the permanent Holocaust exhibit, which was also curated amazingly well. The most striking part of this exhibit was a miniature, all white, to-scale model of over 6,000 Jews arriving at Auschwitz from the Berehovo ghetto in June 1944. The model showed them climbing out of cattle cars, lining up to be sorted to the left or the right and showed the figures who had already been sorted walking over to the camp bunkers or far off to the other side to the gas chambers. It was stunning how huge the area was. The model was 40 feet long and over 6 feet wide, and the tiny figures weren't even half as tall as my pinky finger. The model was amazingly detailed and gave a clear, sobering impression of how vast the camps actually were.

The Union flag outside of the IWM

Hermione’s House

Since many scenes in the eight Harry Potter movies were filmed in and around London, there are a lot of minor filming locations scattered about. I made it my mission early on to see as many as humanly possible.

One weekend in late November, I convinced Maggie to come with me to Hampstead’s Garden Suburb to see St. Jude-on-the-Hill, or St. Jude’s Church. (Re-watch Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 1 and pay attention to the scene where Hermione has just wiped her parents’ memories and is walking away from home. That church she’s walking towards is St. Jude’s.)

I know what most of you are thinking. Something along the lines of “a little obsessive, isn’t it Megan?”

Yea, well whatever. The area is pretty too. (Plus if you’re already thinking that, you might not want to read the next section.)

After a Tube change and a bus ride, we got close and walked through the beautiful Hampstead Garden Suburb until we found the church. We went a little picture crazy, recreating the shot where she’s walking away from home over and over again for about a half an hour. Finally satisfied, we walked away from the church toward the Heath. (And took a photo of every house along the way in case it was Hermione’s house.)

Film shot

Maggie recreation

The view of the street looking away from St. Jude's

Is that Hermione's house?

Is that??

We walked through the Heath for a while before walking around to the front of St. Jude’s Church, which faces in on the main town square near The Free Baptist Church and The Henrietta Barnett School, a grammar school for girls. The whole square is beautiful and definitely worth seeing if you visit London and have the time.

The front of St. Jude's Church

The Free Church

The Henrietta Barnett School

Privet Drive

Martins Heron is a suburb of Bracknell in Berkshire, which is 25 miles outside of London. Picket Post Close, a street in Martins Heron, was used as the filming location for Privet Drive in the first three Harry Potter films, with Number 12 Picket Post Close being used as Number 4 Privet Drive. The street, the front of the house, and the back of the house (in the third film when Aunt Marge blew up) are all shown in the movies. After the third film, a replica of the street was built in the studio and used for the final five movies.

The owners have said they regret agreeing that their house could be used as the famed Number 4 Privet Dr. because of the dedicated fans (like Maggie and me) who make the trip to take photos outside of their home.

As much as I understand that this must suck, there was no way that I was going to live half an hour from the original filming location of Privet Drive and not go see it.

Maggie and I took the Tube to central London to catch a train to Martins Heron on December 6, the day before Felicia and I took a bus to Ipswich. It was cold and overcast - basically perfect London weather if you ask me. We got off the train at the tiny station and began walking the route that my phone outlined, discussing how we would be the least creepy about taking photos in front of someone’s home and settling on strolling past the house on the first pass as if we were simply going for a leisurely walk.

No. 12 Picket Post Close

We found the street and turned, nerding out silently with a lot of hitting and muffled exclamations when we saw the row of houses from the films and attempted to walk casually by. (Which probably looked about the same as spastic children trying to walk by an ice cream truck without buying anything, but whatever.) We quickly ran into a problem though since about three houses later the street ended in a cul-de-sac with no outlet. We walked up a random driveway looking for a path to the park behind them and had to walk back shamefully when we found none. There were no cars in any of the driveways though and the houses looked pretty empty, so to avoid having to make a second awkward pass we took photos as discreetly as possible before exiting the street and walking on towards a park.

(Side Note: As we approached the park we saw a small cat with markings around its eyes. Yep, that’s right - we saw McGonagall. We scared her away though by approaching too enthusiastically.)

Maggie is ridiculously photogenic. 

Maggie: "Pretend you're casting a spell. I can't see the wand
against the sky. Kneel down. No, no don't do that, you look
stupid." 

After more photos and a rest in the park, we visited the house once more, emboldened, this time standing a bit closer to take a few more photos before reluctantly leaving and returning to London. 

Other Photos

Classy West End

Is that...

A Blue Plaque? By the White Cube?

It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas!

Oxford Streed Decorations

Another one?

This one was near the IWM

Row Houses from the front of the bus on the way to St. Jude's.

It seems that every famous person who ever lived in London
for any amount of time lived in Hampstead at least once. 

The Heath

My future home

RLO - Bank Holidays

It seems like half of the time when I Skype Palak she has the day off because it's a Bank Holiday, which basically is the same as a public holiday. Although people aren't entitled to time off, the banks are closed and most people get Bank Holidays off, hence the name. 

I know we have a lot of little holidays here in the US, like President's Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day,  Labor Day and so on, but if people are getting time off for the day, we usually attach some meaningful value to it. As an example, we don't get April Fool's Day off because you aren't honoring anyone, you're just putting salt in sugar bowls, vaseline in hand sanitizer bottles and other stupid things like that.

Bank Holidays in the UK do include Christmas and Boxing day and New Years day, but they also include random days that don't really seem to be for anything other than just taking time off. I really think the Brits have the right idea though since most of their random days are Mondays, like the first Monday in May (May Day), the first Mondays in June and August (for kicks and giggles), the Monday after Easter, and the last Mondays in May, August and October (also seemingly just for fun). 

So apparently if you a) like random days off, and b) hate Mondays, the UK is the place to be. I'm going to go look at one-way tickets now. 

Londonisms

Pot Noodle - Cup O' Noodle

Hosepipes - garden hose

Junction - intersection

Bum Bag - fanny pack

Chin - punch

Bang on - spot on (i.e. I didn't expect it to be so bang on.)

Que Jump - cut in line