Description: | Collections originated with the Guildhall Museum, estd 1826 and the London Museum, established in 1911; these amalgamated in 1975 to become Museum of London. Over 1.1million objects and Europe's largest archaeological archive from c 400,000BC to the present day recording the history of what is now Greater London.
1. "Early London History" Collections, from before 1700, comprise over 85,000 objects and are strong in fields such as ceramics, jewellery, numismatics and metalwork. See entry for Archaeology Collection
2. "Later London History" collections, from the 18th century onwards, include 200 oil paintings, 15,000 prints and drawings, 100,000+ items of ephemera from posters to tickets, 280,000+ photographs and 4,000 hours of oral history interviews, 20,000 items of clothing and textiles and 75,000+ items of decorative arts and social history.
The bulk of the Museum's three-dimensional object collections are contained in this section. A great variety of subjects are represented and most objects have good London contexts and good supporting information.
Social history includes general domestic material, good holdings of toys, including the Ernest King collection of Edwardian penny toys; vehicles, food packaging, architectural and building fragments, street furniture, shop fronts and interior fittings from a variety of London buildings.
Working history includes one of the largest collections of tools and workshop material is in the UK. Many trades are represented including clock and watchmaking, wheelwrights, glass-making, silk-weaving, braid-making, shoe-making and repairing, silversmiths, button-making, printing, engraving, ballet shoe-making. Many of the workshop groups include equipment, tools, fittings and archive material. There are representative holdings of general office and London markets equipment and material from London's entertainment industries.
13,000 decorative arts items: ceramics and glass, metalwork and jewellery, coins and medals, furniture, small decorative objects |