I chanced on another one of London’s municipal museums today – the Redbridge Museum which occupies part of the first and second floors in the borough’s main library building in the centre of Ilford.
I’ve visited some quite poor local museums this year, but fortunately Redbridge is an exception to the rule. Occupying quite a large footprint at the top of the building, you enter next to the shop and the first thing that you discover is an area given over to the more unusual aspects of the borough’s past:
- Starting in the early 1720s a local businessman, Daniel Day, acquired some land near Fairlop and, on the first Friday in July when he collected the rent from local tenant farmers, he started a tradition of having a breakfast of bacon and beans under the Fairlop Oak, a ‘beanfeast’. By 1725 this had attracted market stalls and various entertainments, and by the 1750s the ‘Fairlop Fair’ attracted nearly 100,000 people every year. Banned in 1793 because of concerns about immoral and lascivious behaviour, it appears that this order was ignored and there is documentary evidence that it continued on well into the late 1800s.
- An early cycling tradition was started in the area with the Woodford Cycle Meet, from June 1883 right up until 1914 every year hundreds of people would cycle around Woodford and Wanstead dressed in elaborate costumes on equally elaborately decorated bicycles – there’s an example of a flower-covered bicycle amongst the museum’s displays.
In this part of the museum there are also recreations of domestic properties – the parlour of a house on the Cranbrook Park Estate (which was built between 1897 and 1907 by W.P.Griggs) and the kitchen of a 1930s home. Ilford, Wanstead and Woodford were suburban areas by this point as huge amounts of development had taken place along the railway line, which was capable of whisking commuters into central London in under 30 minutes. Contrast that with the Ilford of the turn of the century which had 60 working farms and was often described as ‘All sky and turnips’!
From here on in the museum contains cabinets themed around each decade, which also focus on the lives of particular local people. So, for example, the 1920s section contains a study of Winston Churchill, who was the MP for the Wandstead and Woodford constituency for over 35 years. The 1930s display features local schoolboy Leonard Perry and his experiences of being evacuated at the start of World War II, while the 1940s looks at the wartime exploits of Ron Harrison, a soldier who served with the Royal Artillery in Egypt and then the Royal Fusiliers in Italy until the end of the War. This part of the museum also contains two rather sinister artifacts – the rusted casing of a defused bomb and bits of masonry retrieved from the shattered remains of buildings in Ilford and Woodford Green which were destroyed by enemy action.
The ’50s celebrates the achievements of Sylvia Pankhurst, who lived in Woodford from 1924 to 1956 and was a leading member of the suffragette movement, and then we get to my favourite feature of the Redbridge Museum – the displays dedicated to the history of Ilford Cameras. They left Ilford for the sunnier climes of Basildon back in 1976 and then went through various changes of ownership, but even today the company is recognised as being one of the best producers of black and white photographic film in the world. In fact I have several reels of Ilford film in my camera bag to prove it now…
The themed displays go on to cover the 1980s and 1990s, and at the moment there’s also an area dedicated to the London 2012 Olympic Games – several local residents were performers in the Opening Ceremony and local man Arun Patel took part in the Torch Relay when it passed through the borough on 29 August of this year.
Leaving behind the Redbridge Museum proper, down on the first floor part of the building acts as a temporary gallery space. Closing this weekend is one of the most colourful and vibrant exhibitions I’ve ever seen – a study of Kathakali, the classical dance tradition of Kerala in India. This particular art form is used to dramatise the Hindu epics of Mahabharatha and the Ramayana which feature many of the religion’s gods and goddesses, and several of the elaborately decorated costumes have been gathered together for this exhibition. As their faces are usually hidden behind masks, Kathakali performers traditionally use Mudras (a form of sign language developed in the Indian subcontinent over 4000 years) to communicate with the audience, and eight to ten years of study of the art form is required before students can take part in the annual events.
If you’d like to pay a visit to the Redbridge Museum, it is open from 10am to 5pm Tuesday through Friday, and 10am to 4pm on Saturdays. The museum is closed on Sundays and Mondays. If you want to see the Kathakali exhibition, the last day for this temporary gallery is this Saturday, 22 December.
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