London Making

This month's theme is London's Arts and Craft

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  Stitches in Time: learning through remaking

  Anna Laviniere, a Collections Management trainee at the Museum of London, tells us what she has learned about one extraordinary object in the collections through the process of remaking.

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  Faking it! (with style)

  Fakes and clever imitations have played an important role in London’s fashion history. Often unable to afford the real deal, Londoners on a budget sought out clever imitations to stay à la mode! We look at some brilliant fakes from our collection.

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  Vegetable patch: conserving Una Maw's dolls

  The museum's Vegetable Dolls are amazing hand-made dolls depicting a range of extraordinary characters. But before we could put these century-old dolls on display, we had to restore them to their former glory.

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  Headstone Manor: inspiring Whitefriars Glass

  Some of the most beautiful objects in the London collection are those produced by the famous Whitefriars glassworks of James Powell and Sons. In partnership with the Museum of London, Headstone Manor in Harrow have for the first time digitised a 19th century book of designs revealing the inspiration for some of the striking Whitefriars Glass in our collections.

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  The smallest dragon in London

  Smaller than a five pence coin, the smallest dragon resides in storage at the Museum of London. An object of fascination, almost nothing is known about it, aside from that it was made and used in medieval London.

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  Venus: an allegory of love, mythology and womanhood

  Claire Partington’s version of the Roman goddess of love, beauty and fertility, Venus, is also an amalgamation of Hindu mythology, Renaissance Madonna and a modern everyday woman. We take a deep dive into the different references that can be seen in this fantastic ceramic figure.

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  Tiles, tiles, and more London tiles!

  From Roman Londinium and 18th-century coffee houses to modern-day Tube stations, London has been home to a vibrant and varied ceramic tile industry for centuries. Here’s a reminder, as we walk the streets of London, to look up and around ourselves, and enjoy this city of tiles.

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  Inside The Vegetable Kingdom

  Lucie Whitmore, fashion curator, tells us the story of the cloth dolls of The Vegetable Kingdom and their eccentric maker, Una Maw.

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  The lost art of flower-making

  This interview takes you into the vanished world of Victorian flower-makers with Beatrice Behlen, senior curator of fashion and decorative arts, and Natasha Fenner, curatorial assistant.

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  Easter egg hunting at the Museum of London

  What happens when we go Easter egg hunting across the museum’s 7-million-strong collection? In our egg-citing basket, we found a real medieval egg, those with sombre WWII associations, a quirky egg-heeled shoe, a mysterious egg by the River Thames, and so much more! We’re not egg-agerating when we say it’s an egg-cellent collection.

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  Marvellous miniature Roman relics

  The Museum of London's Archaeological Archive houses a vast collection of more than one million objects, far more than we can display in our galleries. Delving into our stores, Glynn Davis selects three of the smallest items from our Roman collections, each with a big story behind them.

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  Crafted love: bent coins, lovespoons and a whale’s tooth!

  Love can be strange, and sometimes, so can tokens of love. Looking through the Museum of London’s extensive collection, we throw the spotlight on some quirky ‘love tokens’ with an element of craft, which have both romanticism (of creating something with one’s own hands) and practicality (spoons, stay busks or ironing boards!). Interestingly, the similarity of many of these customs range from Europe to Asia!

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  Made in London: the past and future of craft in the city

  We explore how modern cities can help expert makers flourish, and how London might maintain its skilled trades. Curator of Making Danielle Thom explores the rich history and threatened future of making in London.

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  Of Victorian cravat pins and Cleopatra’s Needle

  How did a chip off a 3,500-year-old Egyptian obelisk, braving an arduous journey across the seas, wind up encased in silver as a 19th-century fashionable Victorian cravat pin?

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  Three women artists and London’s obscure landscape

  We’ve all seen London’s iconic landscape on canvases from across the centuries, but what happens if you try to make a less obvious image of the city? We explore how three contemporary female artists have employed unconventional or disruptive techniques to make new work about London.

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