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ISBN 9781785036897
WALK THROUGH HISTORY: Victorian London is an exciting new way to explore London afresh. Walking becomes an adventure, the streets become places of discovery and surprise, history comes alive.
Victorian London is all around us. And yet much of it goes unappreciated, hidden from view by familiarity and everyday life.
The London we live in today is, to all intents and purposes, Victorian London. Londoners live in Victorian houses, are taught in Victorian schools, worship in Victorian churches, are treated in Victorian hospitals, drink in Victorian pubs, play in Victorian parks and gardens, are entertained in Victorian theatres and Victorian museums, drive down Victorian streets, cross Victorian bridges and travel on Victorian railways.
Over the course of Queen Victoria’s reign, between 1837 and 1901, London’s population grew from something over one million to more than seven million people and the Victorians had to build a city that could accommodate such numbers. They cleared away the slums and laid out London’s streets and public parks. They built the first social housing and the first effective sewerage system. They built the first proper schools and hospitals, the first libraries and museums, galleries and theatres, the first railway stations and public transport system. Inspired by Catholic Emancipation and the Anglican revival they built hundreds of churches and chapels. They built the first luxury apartment blocks and hotels. They built terraces and villas and cottages and studios. They built the great edifices of the modern state, the Houses of Parliament, the Government Offices, the Law Courts. They built the great monuments to commerce, the offices and warehouses, department stores and shopping streets and market places. They built the great monuments to finance, the banking halls and insurance halls and counting houses that made Victorian London into the world’s leading financial centre, which it still is today. Immigration and trade from all over the world made Victorian London into the first world city, and it remains today the world’s most cosmopolitan city.
Social and technological advances during the Victorian Age required new buildings for new purposes. Professional architects came into being to design them and different architects championed different styles.
At the beginning of the Victorian Age the predominant style was classical, based on ancient Greco-Roman architecture and reflected in the endless rows of stuccoed Italianate terraces of west London built in the 1840s and 50s.
As the Victorian Age progressed new technologies and building methods and materials gave architects a greater choice and the ‘Battle of the Styles’ developed, with Gothic Revival providing the greatest competition. The champions of the Gothic style, as developed by the medieval English church builders, regarded it as symbolic of Christianity, and thus Gothic became the style of choice for churches and for buildings associated with the Church, schools and hospitals and even those cathedrals of learning, museums. Gothic was also thought of as the purest form of English expression and hence was chosen as the design for the Houses of Parliament, perhaps the most distinctive national parliament building in the world. Architects such as Sir George Gilbert Scott and William Butterfield then elaborated on the Gothic and made it their own with polychrome bricks, terracotta and ironwork.
Conscious of the religious overtones of Gothic, the secular world largely stuck with classical, hence London’s many Italianate and classical banking halls and head offices, clubs such as the Reform Club and the National Liberal Club, hotels such as the Charing Cross Hotel and the Grosvenor.
As London’s population exploded, new kinds of domestic buildings were required. J.J. Stevenson and Norman Shaw developed mansion blocks and town houses in what became known as the Queen Anne style of red brick and stone. Sir Ernest George and Harold Peto favoured a flamboyant Flemish style with steep gables and tall chimneys. The Arts and Crafts movement developed its own style, harking back to the medieval world but free from the religious elements.
Each of these styles had within it many variations, and thus London is blessed with a greater variety of architecture than perhaps any other city on Earth. The vision and imagination and confidence that created Victorian London is breathtaking. The attention to detail on even the most mundane of buildings is extraordinary. The genius of Victorian engineering prowess is spectacular.
Although much of Victorian London has been lost to bombing and crass urban planning, organisations such as the Victorian Society and heroes such as Sir John Betjeman have ensured that much has also been saved – so much in fact that it would be impossible to cover it all. So, Walk through History: Victorian London cherry-picks the best of it for you, visiting some of the city’s greatest Victorian treasures and leading you to some of the finest examples of Victorian London’s many faces.
A note of warning. Walking through Victorian London can become addictive. Once your attention has been drawn to Victorian London you will see it everywhere. Never again will you be able to walk down a street blissfully unaware of that Victorian terrace or school or church. Never again will you be able to pass by a Victorian building without informing those around you of what architectural style it is and who the architect was and who lived and worked there. Never more will you be able to resist pointing out the detail, the varied window arches and ironwork, the terracotta and stone dressings, the polychrome brickwork, the statues and carvings and friezes.
And ‘why,’ you will ask yourself, ‘have I never noticed that before?’
THE WALKS IN each of the seven chapters of this book cover different areas of central London, areas that serve different purposes, have a different atmosphere and possess different types of architecture. Although the walks in each chapter are contiguous and can be completed in one day, they have been designed to be walked in stages as well. How many walks to do and how long to take depends entirely upon the individual reader, how fast he or she walks, how much time is available, how much time the reader decides to spend at each attraction, how many breaks for refreshment are taken. Each walk never strays far from an underground station so that the reader may start and finish at any point on the walk. Recommended places for refreshment are marked on the map and, in most cases, featured in the text.
All I would advise is that the walks will inevitably take longer than you think – there is so much to see and, once attuned, readers may well find themselves wandering off to look at something that has caught their eye away from the main route.
Above all, I hope that Walk through History: Victorian London, will encourage you to want to walk but also to see.
The maps are not to scale and have been simplified for the sake of clarity, omitting unnecessary street names, but when in situ on the walk the map directions are easy to follow.
WE BEGIN THIS leg of the walks at Kensington Palace, where Queen Victoria and the age to which she gave her name were born. We then explore the site of the Great Exhibition of 1851, the defining achievement of the Victorian Age, and the museum area of South Kensington, inspired by and financed out of the profits of that Exhibition. Here is perhaps the greatest accumulation of educational and cultural institutions anywhere in the world, and also some of London’s most striking Victorian buildings. After Prince Albert, the driving force behind the Exhibition, died in 1861, buildings and memorials were erected in his memory overlooking the site of his greatest achievement and the area became known, affectionately, as Albertopolis.
Numbers applied to each attraction refer to the numbers on the map
Exit the station, turn right into Queensway, cross Bayswater Road on your left then right and left into Kensington Gardens. Follow the Broad Walk to Kensington Palace.
KENSINGTON PALACE IS where the Victorian Age truly began. Not only was Victoria born here in 1819, but this is where she was in the early hours of 20 June 1837, at the moment that her uncle William IV died and she became queen. And it was at Kensington Palace, that same morning, that Victoria held her first Privy Council meeting, declaring, ‘The severe and afflicting loss, which the nation has sustained by the death of his Majesty, my beloved uncle devolved upon me the duty of administering the government of this empire.’
The Red Saloon where the meeting took place has been refurbished and laid out as it was for that occasion, and on the wall hangs a painting by Sir David Wilkie, that recreates the scene. To sit where Victoria sat, 18 years old, untested, surrounded by the 97 most powerful men in the land and yet showing ‘perfect calmness and self-possession’, is a moving experience.
No one knew it at the time, but that day in the Red Saloon marked the dawn of the modern world, and of the Victorian London that would become that new world’s first city. The Victorian Age would see London grow into the biggest, most populous, most prosperous and most famous city on Earth, the spiritual, political, financial and trading capital of the world and the beating heart of the biggest empire ever known. From London, Queen Victoria would rule over almost a quarter of the world’s population and a fifth of the world’s land mass.
Once you have visited Kensington Palace to see where Queen Victoria was born and the Red Saloon where she held her first Privy Council meeting, make your way to the statue of Queen Victoria that stands at the west entrance to the palace, gazing out over Kensington Gardens and the Round Pond. This was sculpted by Victoria’s talented artist daughter Princess Louise in 1893.
From the statue go to the Round Pond and walk around it with the pond on your left. Veer right at the first path you come to, then left on to the next, broader, path. Go over two crossroads then right on to a broader path which leads to the Albert Memorial.
WHEN IT WAS built the Albert Memorial was considered to be amongst the finest monuments in all Europe and today is seen as the epitome of High Victorian gothic grandeur, bold, ostentatious and oozing self-confidence. Commissioned by Queen Victoria as a national memorial to her beloved husband Albert, who died of typhoid in 1861 aged just 42, it was designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott and unveiled in 1872. A number of eminent architects competed for the commission, with Scott’s design being chosen by the Queen herself, and Scott later received a knighthood for his work. The memorial, which is 175 feet (53 m) high and contains huge quantities of marble, enamels, bronze and mosaics, cost £10 million in today’s money and the Prime Minister of the day William Gladstone attempted to delay the project on the grounds of cost, a move which did not improve his already strained relations with the Queen.
At the four outer corners of the memorial are groups of marble statues illustrating Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe, featuring suitably ethnic characters and a representative animal, a camel, a bison, an elephant and a bull, respectively, while at the four corners of the podium are groups symbolic of Agriculture, Commerce, Manufacturing and Engineering. The white marble Frieze of Parnassus around the base of the podium consists of 187 life-size statues of painters (on the east side), poets and musicians (on the south side), architects (on the north side) and sculptors (on the west side), the latter two being arranged in chronological order. A shiny new pound coin for anyone who can find Sir George Gilbert Scott himself amongst the architects. There are further statues on the pillars and in niches in the canopy, all of them watched over by eight gilt bronzed angels.
The 14 foot (4.3 m) high gilt bronze statue of Prince Albert is by John Foley and was put in place in 1876. The Prince is seated and holds in his right hand a catalogue of the Great Exhibition of 1851.
Now go down the steps in front of the memorial and turn left onto the broad tarmac carriageway. Walk to the gates at the end.
THESE CAST-IRON GATES are virtually the only surviving structure from the Great Exhibition that remains in the park where the Exhibition was held. They stood at the entrance to the north transept of the Crystal Palace and were cast at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire by the pioneering Coalbrookdale Company, the first and largest iron foundry in the world, and builders of the world’s first iron bridge. Written along the base of the gates are the words ‘Cast in Coalbrookdale’ – it’s spine-tingling to think that they are a product of the workshop that triggered the Industrial Revolution.
Now cross the road in front of you, West Carriage Drive, and go straight ahead on the tree-lined path alongside South Carriage Drive. Just after the Prince of Wales Gate there is a plaque to the left of the path showing the location of the Crystal Palace within Hyde Park.
THE CRYSTAL PALACE was built to house the world’s first international exhibition of manufactured goods, the Great Exhibition of 1851, organised by Prince Albert and Henry Cole as a showcase for contemporary industrial design and technology from all over the world. The exhibition hosted some 14,000 exhibitors showing over 100,000 exhibits, lasted just over five months and was visited by six million people, the equivalent of a third of the population of Victorian Britain at that time. As well as the Royal Family, famous visitors included Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Lewis Carroll, George Eliot and Alfred Lord Tennyson. Profits from the exhibition, £186,000, or £16 million in today’s money, were used to fund the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum.
The Crystal Palace itself was designed by Joseph Paxton from a concept sketched on a piece of pink blotting paper, which can be seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum. A vast structure of cast iron and glass, it was inspired by the famous Great Conservatory at Chatsworth House, which Paxton had designed and built for the 6th Duke of Devonshire. The Crystal Palace, not only the largest building made of glass the world had ever seen but the largest building in the world at the time, was 1,848 feet (563 m) long and 408 feet (124 m) wide and enclosed an area of 23 acres (9.3 ha). As you stand at the plaque looking north you are standing at what was the entrance to the barrel-vaulted central transept, which was raised to a height of 108 feet (33 m) to accommodate a number of living elm trees.
After the exhibition the Crystal Palace was taken down and rebuilt in Sydenham, where it burned down in 1936. There is almost nothing left of it in Hyde Park, although some of the concrete platform on which it rested remains under the grass playing fields, and in 2016 the remains of a brick-lined earth closet built as a public loo for visitors to the exhibition were discovered near the tennis centre. A highlight of the exhibition was the introduction of the world’s first paid-for flushing public lavatories, invented by a Brighton plumber called George Jennings. The charge was one penny – hence the expression spend a penny. Jennings persuaded Henry Cole to keep the lavatories open for some years after the Exhibition closed and the idea gained popularity with growing numbers of ‘Public Retiring Rooms’ springing up throughout London, many of them built by the prolific Sir Samuel Morton Peto, builder amongst many other places of Nelson’s Column and the Reform Club, who we come across several times on our walks.
THE LOCATION OF the four corners of the Crystal Palace are marked by round plaques set into the pavement, and by walking to each of these plaques you can get a sense of the enormous scale of the structure. From the plaque by the Prince of Wales Gate continue east along the tree-lined path and you will find the south-east corner plaque about 100 yards (90 m) beyond the tower of Knightsbridge Barracks looming on the other side of the road. From here turn left and cut due north across the playing fields to find the north-east plaque. From there turn left and go west along the path with the playing fields on your left and you will find the north-west plaque set into the path just as it begins to curve around past the tennis courts. Continue on the path as it bears left past the bowling green and you will find the south-west plaque right outside the Pavilion café.
From the café make your way back to the Coalbrookdale Gates by crossing West Carriage Drive. Turn left in front of the gates, then cross Kensington Road and turn right. On your left is Lowther Lodge.
LOWTHER LODGE WAS designed by Norman Shaw in 1873 as a private house for William Lowther MP, and was Shaw’s first large commission in London. Shaw made the Queen Anne style very much his own and would become perhaps the foremost domestic architect of the later Victorian period. Lowther Lodge was not just innovative in its architecture but was also at the cutting edge of the new technology – it was the first private house in London to have a lift, which is still in use in the main hall. Lowther Lodge remained a private house until 1912 when it was sold by the Lowther family to the Royal Geographical Society for its headquarters.
Continue west along Kensington Gore.
TOWERING OVER LOWTHER Lodge to the west is Albert Hall Mansions, London’s first mansion block, designed in a red-brick, Flemish style by Norman Shaw in 1880 with little regard to how the vast new edifice would overpower his earlier, rather more elegant work at Lowther Lodge. By the late nineteenth century London’s population was exploding, and building land in the west of the city was becoming scarce. Even the wealthy had to learn to squeeze into apartment blocks, previously the preserve of the working classes. To make the idea more palatable, fashionable architects were hired to design grand ‘mansion’ blocks that resembled hotels, with spacious lobbies and uniformed doormen. The apartments were sumptuous, with wine cellars, bathrooms, accommodation for staff, balconies with iron railings and the latest technology, such as lifts. Albert Hall Mansions set the benchmark for apartment blocks all over London and the style was copied for the next 30 years. Look for the neat little oriel windows beneath the Dutch gables on the fifth floor – they were a favourite embellishment of Shaw’s.
Continue along Kensington Gore.
QUEEN VICTORIA LAID the foundation stone of the Central Hall of Arts and Sciences in 1867, declaring that it should henceforth be known as the Royal Albert Hall of Arts and Sciences in memory of her husband, Prince Albert. That very foundation stone can still be seen, beneath seat 87 in row 11 of the K stalls.
In response to Prince Albert’s suggestion that the profits from the Great Exhibition of 1851 be used to establish a permanent centre for the arts and sciences, the Royal Commission in charge of the Exhibition’s finances purchased a parcel of land on the south edge of Hyde Park on which to build the facilities. The area was centred on Gore House, the easternmost house of a row of large mansions that had been built alongside the road from Kensington to London in the eighteenth century. In 1850, after it had been purchased by the Commission, Gore House became Soyer’s Gastronomic Symposium of All Nations, a fashionable restaurant catering for visitors to the Great Exhibition run by French chef Alexis Soyer, formerly of the Reform Club (see here).
In 1857 Gore House was demolished and work began on the Royal Albert Hall, designed by Captain Francis Fowke and Colonel H.Y. Darracott Scott of the Royal Engineers, was erected on the site, being completed in 1871. Hailed for being as grand and imposing as anything from the glory days of Rome it was built to resemble an amphitheatre, it is elliptical in shape, 740 feet (225m) in circumference, with a central dome of glass and steel 135 feet (41m) high, and can accommodate some 7000 people. The frieze that runs around the outside of the building illustrates the Triumph of Art and Letters.
The Hall’s first concert, performed to test the acoustics, was held on 25 February 1871 when an amateur orchestra, The Wandering Minstrels, played in front of an invited audience that included the men who had worked on the building and their families. In fact the acoustics turned out to be dire, with a notorious echo that gave rise to the quip that ‘the only place where a British composer could be sure of hearing his work twice is the Albert Hall’. It wasn’t until 1968 that the problem was solved by suspending sound absorbent discs from the dome.
On 29 March 1871 the Royal Albert Hall was officially declared open by Edward, Prince of Wales, with the words, ‘The Queen declares this Hall is now open’, the Queen herself being too overcome with emotion to speak. Highlights at the Hall during the Victorian Age included the Great Wagner Festival in 1877, with the orchestra conducted by Richard Wagner himself, Sunday afternoon concerts with the likes of Dame Nellie Melba and Adelina Patti, and a talk in 1890 by Sir Henry Morton Stanley about his travels in Africa searching for David Livingstone. In 1891 the Hall hosted the world’s first ever sci-fi convention, an event inspired by the hugely popular science fiction novel by Lord Lytton, Vril: The Power of the Coming Race. The Hall was dressed up to look like Vril-ya, a city inhabited by winged super beings, represented by mannequins flying overhead. There were Vril themed magic shows and entertainments and even stalls selling mugs of Bovril, whose name was derived from the words ‘Bovine’ and ‘Vril’.
Now walk anti-clockwise round the Royal Albert Hall to the south side, passing through an area of dark and echoing canyons created by the giant red-brick mansion blocks that wrap around the Hall. This spot is pure Victoriana.
AT THE TOP of the steps leading down to Prince Consort Road is a monument that should be better known but, because of its location tucked away behind the Royal Albert Hall, goes largely un-remarked. The Memorial to the Exhibition of 1851 was designed by Joseph Durham with help from Sydney Smirke and is made from two varieties of granite, Aberdeen Red and Cornish. Four bronze female figures sit at the base of the pedestal representing Europe, America, Asia and Africa, while Prince Albert stands on top gazing out over Albertopolis. The original plan was to have a statue of Britannia at the top, but after Prince Albert’s death Queen Victoria requested that it should be a statue of Albert, as one of the two main driving forces behind the Exhibition. The memorial was eventually erected in 1863 in the show gardens of the Royal Horticultural Society nearby, but was moved to its present site in 1891 when the gardens were demolished to make way for Prince Consort Road.
A LITTLE FURTHER round the Hall, on the west side, is one of the most memorable houses in London, the extraordinary Royal College of Organists, recognisable to many as the home of Mr Selfridge in the ITV drama series of that name. It was built as the National Training School for Music in 1875 and designed by Lieutenant H.H. Cole, the eldest son of Henry Cole, the other main driving force behind the Great Exhibition. The entire façade of the house, except for the large windows, is covered in decorative raised plasterwork known as sgraffito, while a frieze depicting a variety of musicians runs above the front door and ground-floor windows. The National Training School for Music was soon replaced by the Royal College of Music, and in 1904 the Royal College of Organists moved in. They moved on in 1990 but left their name behind.
FRAMING PRINCE ALBERT’S view from his Exhibition Memorial is the vast Gothic Royal College of Music, designed by Sir Arthur Blomfield, in a kind of grand Baronial style that might be considered overpowering, but it is certainly not uninteresting. There may be a touch of Dracula’s castle about it, but it makes an impressive statement, and had the building been there when Wagner was conducting in the Albert Hall it might have inspired that redoubtable composer to even darker dramatic heights. The foundation stone was laid in 1890 to the accompaniment of some lustily performed music belted out by the Leeds Forge Brass Band brought along by Samson Fox, the Yorkshire industrialist who financed the building, and whose bust stands in the entrance hall. Samson Fox was responsible for one of the most significant inventions of the Victorian Age, the corrugated boiler flue, which enabled small boilers to work under much greater pressure than had previously been the case. He was also patriarch of the Fox acting dynasty, being great-grandfather to Edward and James Fox and great-great-grandfather to Emilia and Laurence Fox.
Now go down the steps into Prince Consort Road and look back towards the Albert Hall for a glorious vista of Victorian red and white, quite unlike any other view in London. With the Royal College of Music at your back, turn to your right and proceed along Prince Consort Road. Albert Court, the apartment block on the left, was built between 1890 and 1889. You will notice that the top floors are rather plain compared to the elaborate lower floors. The building had reached the fourth floor when the builders ran out of money and the top three floors, above what became known as the ‘bankruptcy line’, had to be completed as cheaply as possible.
The red-brick house with terracotta decoration on the corner as you reach Exhibition Road is one of a pair of attractive Queen Anne style houses built in 1876 by J.J. Stevenson. It now houses the Jamaican High Commission.
Turn right into Exhibition Road, go past the ultra-modern Imperial College building and turn right into Imperial College Road until you come to a tall Renaissance style tower, standing at the front of an open square and looking somewhat out of keeping with the modernity surrounding it. The whole area between Prince Consort Road and Imperial College Road was at one time occupied by the Imperial Institute, founded after the Colonial Exhibition of 1886. It was housed in a huge stone building designed by Thomas Collcutt and constructed between 1886 and 1893. This building was demolished bit by bit from 1957 onwards and replaced over time by the present modern blocks of Imperial College, leaving just this one tower from the original Victorian complex.
AT 287 FEET (87 m) high, the Queen’s Tower is the tallest structure in this part of Kensington, and yet still comes as a surprise, tucked away as it is down a private gated road and hidden from view by the encircling Imperial College buildings. In fact the tower’s distinctive copper dome can be glimpsed from Kensington Gardens if you know where to look. The Queen’s Tower was the central one of the Imperial Institute’s three towers, and was only saved from being demolished along with the rest of the Institute in the 1960s thanks to a fiercely fought campaign of local enthusiasts ably abetted by Sir John Betjeman. The foundations and base had to be reinforced so that the tower could become free-standing.
Built to mark Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, the tower contains a set of ten bells named after Victoria and some of her children and grandchildren, which are still rung on royal anniversaries. A series of spiral staircases consisting of 325 steps lead up to a viewing gallery at the base of the dome, from where there are stupendous views over London in all directions. The gallery used to be open to the public, and hopefully will be again one day, but for now the views can only be enjoyed by special arrangement with Imperial College. The entrance to the tower is guarded by two stone lions from a set of four that once sat at the entrance to the Imperial Institute.
Now return to Exhibition Road and turn right.
ON THE LEFT after 100 yards (90 m), and hard to miss, is the monumental red-brick and terracotta Henry Cole Wing of the Victoria and Albert Museum, named in honour of the museum’s first director. It was constructed between 1868 and 1873, with Henry Cole himself having a hand in the design, along with Henry Scott and Richard Redgrave. Many of the Early Renaissance style decorative features on the building such as the mosaics, the moulded terracotta, the putti and other figures on the pillars were a first for a Victorian building and something of an experiment. Note, also, the open loggia on the top storey. Inside, the Grand Staircase is particularly impressive. The building was first occupied by the School of Naval Architects, then the Science School and finally Imperial College, before being annexed to the V&A in 1978. The stone screen in front of the newly paved area next to the Henry Cole Wing was put up in 1909 by Aston Webb to hide the unsightly boiler house yard that was located there originally The stonework of the screen still shows signs of the bomb damage it suffered during the Second World War.
AT THE END of Exhibition Road, turn left for the Victoria and Albert Museum. Pause outside the main entrance, a monumental edifice designed by Aston Webb, with a tower above the door 185 feet (56 m) high and shaped at the top like an Imperial crown. Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone in 1899, her last major public engagement, and it was on this occasion that the museum, known as the South Kensington Museum when it opened here in 1857, was renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum. That foundation stone can be seen to the left of the main entrance door.
Before you go into the museum, look back across the road and a little to the left. Facing the museum, from the end of a terrace, is a Victorian house nestling behind a tree and a red pillar box. This is No. 33 Thurloe Square, the former home of Sir Henry Cole (1808–1882), Commissioner for the Great Exhibition and first director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, who in his spare time designed the world’s first adhesive postage stamp, the Penny Black, and invented the Christmas card.
The Victoria and Albert Museum was founded in 1852 as the Museum of Manufactures, and amongst its first collections were many of the products exhibited at the Great Exhibition. The museum opened initially in Marlborough House and then moved in with the School of Design at Somerset House until, in 1857, Henry Cole organised the transfer of all the exhibits of both museum and school to South Kensington, where they were temporarily housed in a huge glass and corrugated iron shed described by The Builder magazine as looking ‘like a threefold monster boiler’. Despite Prince Albert’s attempts to prettify the structure by having it painted with green and white stripes, the shed became known as the Brompton Boilers, and in the 1860s it was removed to Bethnal Green where it was re-erected, clad with new brick walls, to house what became the Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood.
In the meantime new museum buildings were being put up in South Kensington, many of which are now hidden away behind the later Aston Webb frontage. Some have been remodelled over the years and rendered pretty much unrecognisable, although they still form the core of the museum complex. The oldest building is the Sheepshanks Gallery, which was built in 1857 by Captain Fowke (who later built the Albert Hall) to house a picture collection donated by Yorkshire manufacturer John Sheepshanks. This extended north from the Brompton Boilers and, although much altered, survives today as Rooms 26, 29, 84, 92 and 93.
In 1858 Fowke added two more galleries stretching north and east to house the National Gallery’s Turner and Vernon collections. These form the north-east section of the museum, now Rooms 81, 82, 87, 88, 88a and 94. In 1861 the Eastern Galleries completed the eastern side of the square formed by the new buildings. This is now Rooms 96 to 101 on Level 3 with offices below.
In 1863 Fowke roofed over the quadrangle formed by the ‘Boilers’ and the new galleries and divided the space into two to make the North and South Courts, now used as galleries for temporary exhibitions.
The Italian Renaissance style buildings and pavilions that enclose what is now the John Madejski Garden to the north, west and east were designed and begun by Fowke in 1863 and finished off in 1869 by Henry Scott, with external decoration by Geoffrey Sykes. The wonderful Lecture Theatre building on the north side, with the three recessed arches, was originally intended as the main entrance to the museum, and before the Aston Webb building was completed in the early 1900s, it faced south to the Cromwell Road across an area of grass. The splendid bronze front door is sculpted with figures from the history of the arts and sciences, while inscribed above it is the typically Victorian maxim, ‘Better it is to get wisdom than gold’.
While you are in the courtyard look out for two plaques set into the wall of the Madejski Garden. They both commemorate dogs, Henry Cole’s faithful Yorkshire terrier Jim (who appeared with his master in a cartoon in Vanity Fair in 1871) and Tycho, who belonged to Henry’s son Alan Cole.