Toy Museum | Museu do Brinquedo

As we were going to have to analyse an exhibition for one of our modules this term (1st step - choose your exhibition), and we had to be in London in the afternoon for official course business, Kamini, Mireia and I decided to start off the day with something fun: we went to visit Pollock's Toy Museum.

In fact, the original plan, for me and Kamini at least, had been to start off with a stroll round (part of) the British Museum, then move on to meet Mireia at the Toy Museum. Maybe it's just because she's living in Oxford, but Mireia appears to have had better foresight... Neither I nor Kamini were capable of dragging ourselves out of bed early enough to make it to the British Museum!

So, after minor delays caused by late trains and police demonstrations, we eventually convened at Tottenham Court Rd underground station. Unfortunately, none of us had thought to print out directions from the website, so all we had was a rather limited map on the train company's promotion leaflet. Nevertheless, Mireia dug out her trusty A-Z, and we enacted our roles as tourists perfectly:
1.) Stand on a corner looking repeatedly from street names to inappropriate map
2.) Get out different (better?) map
3.) Repeat step one while walking along near-randomly chosen road
4.) Find your destination on map
5.) Find your current location on map
6.) Decide on directions
7.) Round corner still looking at map
8.) Lift eyes momentarily from map (after 7a.- narrowly miss bumping into someone) and spot your destination right in front of you!

So we got there, bought our tickets, and started exploring! Meaning we walked through the first door and sat on the stairs. Before you start labeling us as lazy, allow me to explain: the Museum is housed in a relatively small space, so they make the most of it - the stair walls are covered in board games (complete with explanatory labels) and other toys.

Mireia (Catalonia) and Kamini (England/India) on the stairs with the games

So while we sat on the stairs (after letting two groups of people past, as we were taking longer than them - can't think why!), we learned - amongst other things - that snakes and ladders was originally a more complex Indian game involving ascending to states of increasing purity (through good deeds) or reincarnating in lower life forms (due to bad deeds). And that magnetic fishing, jumping paper frogs, mikado and many other games from our childhoods (including, in Mireia's case, the Juego de la Oca - to all Portuguese people reading this, it existed for year as a board game before being warped onto TV!) had been around in one form or another for far longer that we had imagined... Not to mention getting to see sheep's knuckles like those used as dice by the ancient Greeks...

The "original" snakes & ladders - or near enough!

In the rooms (yes, we eventually got past the stairs), we saw everything from old cardboard theatres to rocking horses, including a cabinet with "Sooty & Friends" cuddlies! Amongst these was the oldest version of a caleidoscope we had ever seen: it basically looked like an old microscope, but on the plate at the bottom there was a pile of randomly glued shreds of coloured fabric, and there was a handle which rotated the plate, so that you saw "changing patterns" when you looked through the view-piece!

There was also a room with waxed dolls, where conversation suddenly turned to horror movies... when Mireia and Kamini had got themselves 'psyched-up' by talks of spending the night at the museum, getting chased by zombie dolls and saved by the oldest and most battered-looking one, someone came into the room through a door they hadn't noticed existed! After my two companions had re-composed themselves, we moved through the "magic door", and eventually came to a room with teddies... unfortunately, old teddies never look very nice, but one display was particularly bizarre: a glass case with a tree on which teddies were sitting/dangling at the weirdest angles! We wondered if they had originally been nicely arranged, then struck by an earthquake - and obviously now no-one must know where the key to the case is... seems the only logical explanation to me...

Our walk back down was via a different set of stairs, where we marveled at Chinese shadow-puppets, traditional African puppets, and many more wonders, until we reached the gift shop, where amongst other things (e.g. replicas of the cardboard theatres to take home and build), Kamini found one of those old handle-wound musical boxes without the box (I've no idea what they're called and can't be bothered to go search) and I found an aardvark cuddly. Now I have what some would call an obsession with cuddlies, and own quite a diverse collection of them myself, but never before had I seen an aardvark cuddly! I resisted temptation, but I may yet acquire one before my stay in the country is over...

By this stage we were in need of sustenance, so we stopped for lunch and then moved on to Euston and the Wellcome Collection, where we managed to see about a third of the Sleeping & Dreaming exhibition before we were due to meet our teacher and the exhibition's curators for an "informal seminar"...

The seminar was really very interesting, especially as we discovered that the exhibition had been created in partnership with a museum in Dresden, having been mainly developed over there and displayed there first - in a bigger and different shaped gallery, which also posed challenges to the transfer. The next collaboration will be the upcoming Medicine & War exhibition, which will be mainly curated by the English, but with considerable input from the Germans - and should be quite interesting, considering the topic!

After the seminar, we went back and saw another third of the exhibition, including a girl falling asleep at a table they had there (and the poor staff-guy not knowing quite how to react), before closing-time kicked us out... So we still have to go back there (anyone want to come?).

We tried to watch a show at the Southbank Centre, but it was sold out, so after discovering the British Film Institute wasn't showing anything we were interested in, we decided to head off home.

I fell asleep on the train... and woke up just as it was leaving Norbiton (a.k.a. my stop)! So I had to go on to Kingston, get off, and catch the train back again. Oh, and hope not to get stopped by any inspectors, as my pass is valid for zones 1-5 and Kingston is in zone 6!

Kamini fell asleep on the tube, as did Mireia on the bus, so it must have been - in Mireia's words - "side-effects of the exhibition"!