Page 434 - The Secret Museum

THE MUSEUM OF LONDON HAS 2 million pieces of London loot which it doesn’t have

space to display. If you include pieces of archaeological material dug up from layers
and layers of earth beneath the city, then they have closer to 6 million things in
storage. The archive collection is in three places: at the Science Museum store in
Wroughton (where Piccard’s gondola lives), at the museum itself on London Wall,
and at the store which I visited, on Eagle Wharf Road in Hackney.

The Hackney warehouse is a huge space heaving with stories and swarming with
archaeologists, of which the museum employs 150. Whenever they find something
interesting they bring it here. Each room is filled with shelves stuffed with objects

that tell the history of London. Take your pick: in the metal store, I saw a hoard of
Roman copper vessels; in a general store, I saw bicycles, old televisions, washing
machines and umpteen different prams. On the shelf below the prams I saw the
architect’s model for the Royal Albert Hall. Some archaeologists showed me certain
items as they went past: a Roman brooch of Noah’s Ark, for example, and a little
bowl that Romans would fill with perfume and take to the baths.

I loved seeing the boxes filled with bricks that had been burnt when the Great Fire
of London began, in a bakery in Pudding Lane, and then raged through the city for

almost five days. Four hundred and thirty six acres of London were destroyed,
including buildings such as St Paul’s Cathedral, and the city smouldered for months.
Plenty of objects from the Great Fire are on display in the museum, but it was all the
more surreal to see these boxes of burnt bricks in storage. I picked up a few pieces
and got ash from Pudding Lane all over my hands.

We continued to explore the oodles of oddities in this Aladdin’s cave of London
town across the years: water pipes made from hollowed-out logs of wood, things dug
up under the supervision of Thomas Hardy when King’s Cross St Pancras station was

built, even relics from a graveyard disinterred when the Eurostar rail line was built.
That seemed very wrong to me.

Then we came to one of the most cheerful things in this storage facility: a huge
wooden cabinet covered in buttons and dials. It looked to me like an old mixing desk
in a recording studio but, when I got closer, I saw there were names written above
the buttons: Yeoman of Cellars, CHEF, Privy Purse Door, Ceremonial Office, D. of
Env. Eng. Dept., Stationery Office and, in the middle, the giveaway to the origin of
this strange beast – button number 65, marked ‘Queen’s Door’.

It is a telephone switchboard made in Coventry between 1930 and 1958 and used

in Buckingham Palace until the 1960s. An operator would sit at the desk transferring
calls within the palace, plugging the call into what look like buttons but are actually
jacks. Before 1912, the Post Office provided staff for the switchboard for free; after
that, they charged for operators, until, alarmed by the increasing costs, Buckingham
Palace employed its own voluntary operators.

It can’t have worked out too well, though, as the palace went back to using Post
Office personnel in 1929. They took on only male operators from then on. It was