Interregnum.
It’s a Latin word that originally signified the time between the reigns of monarchs. Over the centuries, it has also grown to encompass an interval or a pause between two things.
And this post is a brief interregnum between the first and second half of my visit to the Netherlands. It’s a look at how it’s possible to travel the world during a single day in London.
Indeed, it’s possible to see incredible things from all across the globe with a visit to just one museum … provided you don’t think too hard about how the objects were obtained. The Rosetta Stone. The Parthenon marbles. Benin bronzes.
I am of course referring to the British Museum. Despite its imperial past, this is one of the best museums in the world, visited by millions of people each year. I am a card-carrying member, courtesy of MrElaineous’ lovely mother. Being a member of the British Museum means you get to skip the entrance queue, visit the special exhibitions for free without booking tickets in advance, and gain access to the Members’ Room. The membership is worth it just for that; there is seldom a wait for the loos.
My mother-in-law’s gift also started a membership collecting habit: we are now members of most, if not all, of the major London museums. And we would unexpectedly add another membership to our collection before the end of the day.
But I digress. The initial reason for our London visit was to indulge our interest in Japan. We’re fans of anime and Victorian travelogues, and the current exhibition, Hiroshige: Artist of the Open Road, manages to combine both topics in one place.
Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) was a practitioner of the Japanese art of woodblock prints (ukiyo-e). The process itself is complex, with different artisans involved in each step—design, carving, and printing—but the resulting woodblocks could be used thousands of times to produce relatively cheap prints. Publishers then distributed the finished product; this was not an informal cottage industry but mass-produced artwork.
From a modern perspective, these prints can be seen as a form of time travel, showcasing life in the Edo period (1603-1868) before Japan was opened to the rest of the world. Hiroshige himself travelled throughout central Japan, picking up inspiration along the way to depict everyday scenes, peaceful views of nature, and urban activities.
He also innovated in the use of colour. While Hokusai of Great Wave off Kanagawa fame is credited with popularising the use of a new pigment known as Prussian blue, it was Hiroshige who used it to great effect. The blue became his signature style as he pushed it beyond just water and sky to create atmosphere: morning haze, misty roads, and rivers in twilight. Forget lightning in a bottle. This is tranquillity in a frame.
His works were incredibly successful during his own lifetime. Because prints were affordable, they found their way into Japanese homes at all levels of society as well as into the Western world. Indeed, one collector of Hiroshige’s work was a young man by the name of Vincent van Gogh. The exhibition shows both van Gogh’s copy of a Hiroshige print and his own attempt to draw it. Less than a century later, manga—the Japanese comics that gave rise to anime—would find fertile soil in a country that had a tradition of visual storytelling.
We then proceeded to head west to India and jumped a few millennia back in time to the Ancient India: Living Traditions exhibition. It features three religions that emerged in India: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Instead of a comparison of the religions themselves, the exhibit focuses on the origin of sacred art and how it was shared and adapted by other cultures across Asia. Rather than discussing the background in detail, I will let the art speak for itself: it is clear that time, effort, and devotion went into creating these depictions of gods, spirits, and enlightened beings.
We then hopped on the Underground to head across the city to indulge in what is billed as the largest Japanese cultural festival in the UK, the appropriately named Hyper Japan. We thought we had planned it well. After all, we booked tickets in advance. We avoided the opening rush. And we still found that the queue stretched around the block when we arrived.
As we walked along the line of hundreds (and hundreds) of people waiting in the sun, we came to a decision: this was not how we wanted to spend our time. So Japan was ditched for Holland.
Holland Park that is. This 54-acre park is the largest park in the Royal Borough of Kensington, and it sits on the grounds of what was once a 17th-century Jacobean house called Cope Castle. However, the property was inherited by the wife of the Earl of Holland and renamed accordingly. This proved to be an excellent place to seek refuge from the sun while discussing our next move. Should we return to Hyper Japan or head back into central London?
The fact that we never actually saw the end of the queue convinced us that we should retreat. I had a museum in mind, and we had time to kill before our return train.
[A brief aside: It was only while working on this blog post that I discovered that Holland Park is home to a Japanese garden. Which shouldn’t surprise me because Holland Park itself is a stone’s throw from Japan House. I think the garden pre-dates the house, but either way, this part of Kensington is very Japan-centric.]After another trip across London, we found ourselves with a short walk ahead of us before our next destination. The path took us through the Victoria Embankment Gardens, a relic of the 19th century’s push for better sanitation after numerous cholera epidemics.
Before it was understood that microscopic germs caused disease, many people believed in the miasma theory. In other words, diseases were caused by bad smells.
This wasn’t as silly as it sounds. What caused the smells often led to disease … at least in this case. London was a city of 2.5 million people with sewage infrastructure that had failed to keep pace. A combination of cesspits and treating the River Thames as an open sewer created such a stench that Parliament was forced to adjourn in 1858 during a period known as “the Great Stink”.
As a result, engineer Joseph Bazalgette developed a plan to modernise London’s sewage system. He oversaw the creation of over 1,100 miles of sewers, some of which were hidden under land reclaimed from the Thames. This new patch of land became the Embankment Gardens.
The project as a whole was one of the largest infrastructure projects of the time. It is considered a marvel of Victorian engineering, in part because Bazalgette had the foresight to double the size of the sewage tunnels. It’s only now—over 150 years later—that a super sewer is being constructed to continue Bazalgette’s work.
Beyond its historical connections, the gardens are home to memorials to people like Robert Burns and Sir Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame), but it was a camel that caught my eye. Under a magnificent London plane tree sits a memorial to the Imperial Camel Corps and the 346 servicemen of the corps who died serving in the Near East during World War I.
I’ll stop yammering about sewage and camels now, but this is a great example of why I love to visit London. You don’t have to look far to find a connection to history or the wider world beyond the shores of the UK. There is something of interest around every corner … and, in our case, around the next corner was Covent Garden.
This lively part of central London has its origins in medieval times, when a convent operated a walled garden in the space as early as the 13th century. Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century led to the closure of the convent and the loss of an n. However, the Covent name would be resurrected when, in the 17th century, famed architect Inigo Jones created London’s first formal public square. It was based on the design of Italian piazzas and was imaginatively known as the Covent Garden Piazza. Over the next two centuries the area continued to evolve, from hosting a fruit-and-vegetable markets to the Royal Opera House.
Today, it’s more about pizzas and other places to grab a bite to eat or go shopping, but it is also the home of our next target: the London Transport Museum.
This was a museum we had visited briefly in the past since its café is far less crowded than the other venues in the area. I had been curious about what was inside the museum itself ever since. Yet, unlike many of the other major museums in London—the British Museum, Victoria and Albert, Natural History Museum—the LTM is not free. And this is how we found ourselves with yet another membership since entry for a year was only a few pounds more than as a one-off.
But I think it was worth it because the first thing to say about the LTM is that it’s much bigger than it appears from the outside. Another similarity with the TARDIS is that it allows you to engage in a bit of time travel. The building itself is a former Victorian flower market, and visitors start on the top floor in the early 1800s. It then takes you forward through time: postal carriages giving way to horse-drawn omnibuses, above and underground trains, motorised vehicles, river boats, and the modern era of electric public transport.
The second thing is that the LTM was surprisingly fun. For those with children, there are plenty of interactive activities and various vehicles to explore on one of the floors. For those with even a smidgen of interest in history, there is a lot to take in. This was our third museum exhibition of the day and, if my brain wasn’t so full at the time, I would write even more about it. I’ll just wrap up by saying that it’s well worth a visit if you’re looking for something a little different to do … but give yourself a few hours to do it properly.
Japan. India. Holland (sort of). London time travel.
I’ve been fortunate to have the opportunity to make two international journeys this year, but this daytrip was an excellent reminder that you often don’t have to travel far from home to see the world.
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Lovely to see the Japanese woodblock images and learn more about their origin, creation and history. The artwork by Utagawa Hiroshige has an amazing ability to look so sharp and contemporary, as though created only recently. I can see the potential influence on modern artists and comic book creators. Interesting too that his works were bought and displayed by people from different levels of society, rather than being exclusively owned by the rich or superior classes.
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Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Sean! One thing I didn’t mention is that part of the exhibition is showing how modern artists continue to be influenced by his work; there are a handful of lovely modern pieces right at the end. As part of the main exhibit, they also show some of Hiroshige’s work that was more or less meant to be disposable as part of handheld fan coverings. His work was truly an early form of mass consumption, but this is one of the reasons we have so much of it today. It’s a bit like Hokusai; we ran into a print of his Great Wave Off Kanagawa while in Paris!