It’s quite a long walk from Old Street tube station but when you finally arrive it’s quite a nice surprise… one minute you’re on a busy main road and then all of a sudden it’s peace and quiet in a countryside courtyard with big huge trees shading the lawn. All of the brown brick almshouses are wrapped around in ivy and it reminds me of a Cambridge college.
The exhibit begins with a few pieces of Tudor furniture before moving on to a mock-up of the room. Then they do a room from the Stuarts and you keep moving forward through history like that, so you can see how the decorations have changed over the last 400 years.
It’s quite a neat idea but unfortunately it’s all rather dry and boring. None of the reconstructions are original to the almshouse so it’s just a collection of objects they’ve assembled from other places. You get to see a few tables and chairs and writing desks, for example, a few china cups and teapots, some different coloured floorboard planks. You can follow their changing tastes in wallpaper too.
Once you get up to the 1900s you may as well just be walking around a big branch of IKEA because who wants to spend a day looking at office chairs from the 1970s? And the 1980s? And the 1990s? They’ve got some ten-year-old sofas as well.
If you’ve got a particular interest in furniture then you might want to give it a try… but not before you visit the V&A, which is a million billion times better.
If you enjoy this then try Victoria & Albert Museum (take a tube journey from Old Street to South Kensington) and Wallace Collection (travel from Old Street to Bond Street by tube)