I can’t remember a time when I was not enthralled by the Horniman Museum. It stands, beautiful and majestic, on the hill dominating the area where I grew up in South London. It was built in the Art Nouveau style, one of few such buildings in England as the fashion was considered too French and risqué for respectable Victorian society.
Inside was a palace of delights, objects frozen in time: stuffed animals, dancing figures from exotic religions, antique toys, musical devices and instruments of torture.
The first gallery was dominated by a huge Walrus which was actually too big (even for a walrus) as the taxidermist had never seen one in real life and kept stuffing more packing into the skin.
Amid the smell of old floor polish there were motionless birds collected in cases according to whether they looked good together, such as that they all had blue feathers, rather than for any ornithological reason; a sett of badgers and any number of beetles in glass cases.
Down in the basement was an aquarium like a watery sepulcher and the buzzing delight of a beehive designed behind glass in a cutaway design so a child could observe the teeming city.
More exciting than the sand pictures or the life-sized papier-mâché model of Kali stomping on Shiva were the endlessly fascinating mummies. The crumbling cartouches, intricate wrappings and even the mummified cat slumbered in cases with thrilling names like ‘The Cult of the Dead.’ The Horniman mummies gave me the first story I wrote, when I was ten, about getting locked in the museum and the mummies coming to life. Later I took more interest in the Opium pipes from ‘the use of narcotics and stimulants’ section.
As time passed and I grew up to be a proper historian I realised the museum was very much of its time, exemplifying ideas about race, religion and cultural superiority which reflected the attitudes of the people who created it. I think a collection now might not be titled ‘Weapons of Savage, Barbaric and Civilized Peoples’ as the original was. The current curators of the museum recently returned looted Benin bronzes to Nigeria which encapsulates the space once occupied by the Kingdom of Benin whence the bronzes had been taken in a punitive raid in 1897.
In the ‘Punishment and Restraint’ section there was, still labelled thus in my childhood, a ‘Torture Chair of the Spanish Inquisition’ with its gruesome combination of finger crushers and head clamps. It in fact may have never been near Spain but was actually a 3D propaganda device created by Protestants to demonstrate how cruel Catholics were. Thus, in context, it is still an artefact of instructive value though not that which its original collectors intended.
The Horniman is fronted by a mosaic frieze called Humanity in the House of Circumstance by Robert Anning Bell. Humanity in the centre is surrounded by figures representing such earnest attributes as Endurance and Wisdom. My girlfriend and I were amused to note that closest to him are two young women representing Love and Hope, one naked, kneeling and undoing his garment, seemingly about to perform on Humanity some intimate service.
Now I know more about Victorian innuendo, I think that is exactly what the artist was suggesting, and not an imposition on otherwise chaste art of adolescent minds.
The Horniman museum was the creation of Frederick John Horniman, son of the tea magnate John Horniman. Horniman was passionate about collecting from childhood and as soon as he was able he started employing missionaries and travelers, telling them ‘bring back the things they make.’ He thereby augmented his existing natural history collection with an ethnographical collection of artefacts from all over the world, but notably such places as Indian, China, Ceylon, Malaysia and Indonesia. He also travelled himself, personally buying Egyptian relics after being shown around Karnak by Howard Carter, discoverer of Tutankhamen’s Tomb.
At the end of 1890 Horniman opened his home at Surrey House, Forest Hill, as a free museum to the public on three days a week. The story goes that his wife had enough of living in a museum and told him either the collection goes or she goes. She went. Whether or not that is true, the family did move to another premises, leaving Surrey House as a museum.
Soon the collection outgrew its space and Horniman commissioned Charles Harrison Townsend to build the museum as it now stands. It was completed in 1901 and presented to the London County Council. ‘The Horniman Free Museum’ is literally set in stone across the building, it is not just what it is called, but underlines that it will always be, in John Horniman’s words, a gift to the people of London, 'for ever as a free museum for their recreation, instruction and enjoyment'.
My relationship with the Horniman, continues through the stages of life. My schoolday friend David, dead from cancer at 42, has a bench in commemoration overlooking the sunken garden in Hornimans’ grounds. When I started professional life, I bought a Victorian property within minutes of the Horniman. On Sundays I walk with my wife in Horniman Gardens and down the nature trail which runs along the track of what was the Crystal Palace Railway. When the railway was closed in 1952 it was left to grow wild.
The museum is still a popular place and has notably increased its appeal to children; now the galleries are much more progressively orientated. The Horniman won the Art Fund’s Museum of the Year award in 2022. My recent visit found children enjoying the exhibits from other lands in the World Gallery and identifying animals in the Natural History Pop-up. The Horniman continues to enthrall.
Location: 100 London Road, London, SE23 3PQ
Website: www.horniman.ac.uk
Opening: 10-5.30 every day, late night, till 9pm on the first Thursday of every month.
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Jad Adams is a writer who has worked as a television producer and a newspaper journalist. His books include Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives; Hideous Absinthe: A History of the Devil in a Bottle and a novel, Café Europa. www.jadadams.co.uk