Viva la Victorians

This month's theme is Victorian London.

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  Why are these Victorian Christmas cards so weird?

  In the Museum of London’s collection there are over 800 Christmas cards, many of which date back to the Victorian era. We trace the origins of why — on some cards — policemen got whacked by clowns, hares rode Penny Farthing bikes and insects wished you a Merry Christmas!

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  Victorian doodles from Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens

  An unassuming ledger from the Royal Gardens at Vauxhall contains cartoons, jokes and doodles sketched by a bored young wine-seller. These deeply personal jottings give a fascinating insight into everyday life in Victorian London.

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  Windows on the world: London's print shops

  We explore the street culture of Victorian London, and the almost vanished world of print shops that let ordinary Londoners keep up with the news.

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  The lost art of flower-making

  In the Victorian age, hand-made artificial flowers was one of London's trades. These astonishingly detailed, hand-assembled flowers were used to decorate dresses, bonnets and hats. This interview takes you into the vanished world of Victorian flower-makers with Beatrice Behlen and Natasha Fenner.

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  How Bazalgette built London's first super-sewer

  Learn how Joseph Bazalgette - the Victorian engineer who masterminded London's modern sewer system - helped clear the city's streets of poo, and how you're still benefiting from his genius every time you flush.

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  Mapping wealth & poverty in Victorian London

  Lead Curator Alex Werner explains what prompted Charles Booth to self-fund the survey on which the map is based — which allows the onlooker to understand ‘very quickly’, where the wealthy and poor people of London lived.

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  All the fun of the Frost Fair

  Winter wonderland on the Thames? From Stuart London until 1814, the surface of the river froze over twenty-four times. Londoners marked some of these occasions with Frost Fairs, building markets, playing games and cooking meat on the icy surface of the river.

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  The Royal Vauxhall Tavern: charting an iconic LGBTQ venue

  Created to save an iconic queer venue from closure, this magnificent hand-drawn map shows the rich history of South London. Curator Thomas Ardill explains the story of the Plan of the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, and why we've added it to the Museum of London's collections.

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  Cruel cards & loving lobsters: quirky Victorian Valentines

  Valentine's Day cards were big business in Victorian London, and stationers competed to be the most experimental and eyecatching. See some of the weird and wonderful highlights of over 1,700 Valentine’s Day cards in the museum collection.

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  Pleasure Gardens, London's first music venues

  Curator Danielle Thom talks about London's first and most fashionable music venues, the extraordinary Pleasure Gardens. Part of our series on the vanished world of night-life that thrived in Georgian and Victorian London.

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  Royal style dissected

  Many early photographic techniques captured a wealth of detail which we can now zoom into using digital reproductions. This is what we've done with the two sets of stereoscopic daguerreotypes of the Queen in the museum's collection.

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  Victorian virtual reality: the Queen's daguerreotype

  We reveal a set of pioneering daguerreotypes of Queen Victoria, previously unseen by the public. This cutting-edge Victorian technology shows the Queen as you've never seen her before.

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