Museum of Childhood

The original plan was to head towards Bethnal Green tube and head to the next destination straightaway, but we were waylaid by this interesting-looking building. I didn’t take a picture of it as by this time, I’d suffered an unexpected camera mishap :/ Despite the battery reporting itself as full before leaving the house in the morning, it was now flashing low battery warnings at me, so I was taking pictures on my phone mostly and I just could not get a good picture of this building on my very limited phone.

It turned out to be the Museum of Childhood, and it also turned out to be free, so we decided to pop in for a bit.

The Museum of Childhood is an offshoot of the V&A Museum. It was first opened as Bethnal Green Museum in 1872, and over the years has displayed private collections from the Great Exhibition as well as exhibitions of manufacturing and industry, mostly as a way of introducing disadvantaged London Eastenders to a wider cultural and historical knowledge. It wasn’t until after the museum’s post-WW1 repoening that it began to move towards its focus on childhood. In 1974 the V&A officially decided to dedicate the museum to the subject of childhood and moved all its related exhibits over to Bethnal Green.

I have to warn, and apologise for the fact, that the majority of photos for the rest of Day 1 are going to be phone photos due to the annoying behaviour of my camera (and the distance of Bethnal Green from Stockwell, where my charger was). I’ve tried to exclude the uglier grainier ones, but that hasn’t always been possible :<

Filed under: photos