Celebrating Sanctuary at the Horniman Museum

The Horniman Museum has won the 2022 Art Fund 'Museum of the Year' award and it is certainly one of the great treasures of South London (and indeed all of London).

Last month (25 June 2022) it hosted the 'Celebrating Sanctuary' Lewisham Refugee Week Festival. The festival marked 'Lewisham's status as the UK's first borough of sanctuary' and celebrated 'the contributions, creativity and resilience of refugees and people seeking sanctuary'.

There was art from 'Create without Borders' and writing from ekō magazine, orginally founded by Goldsmiths students and publishing in English, Farsi and Arabic.

And in the gardens there was music and dance from the Flotsam Orchestra. This remarkable outernational band has grown out of the regular Flotsam Sessions at Catford Mews where people from different parts of the world come together to share and perform songs.

South London Forever - Florence and The Machine

Possibly slightly biased, but the best track on Florence and the Machine's new album 'High as Hope' (released today) is 'South London Forever'. 

The opening lyrics go:

'When I go home alone

I drive past the place where I was born

And the places that I used to drink

Young and drunk and stumbling in the street

Outside the Joiners Arms like foals unsteady on their feet

With the art students and the boys in bands

High on E and holding hands with someone that I just met

I thought "it doesn't get better than this,

There can be nothing better than this

Better than this"

And we climbed onto the roof of the museum

And someone made love in the grounds

And I forgot my name on the way back to my mother's house'

The Joiners is obviously the famous Camberwell pub on Denmark Hill. I went to some mad 1990s parties round the back of there myself, remember seeing RDF and spinning around to techno in one of those gyroscope things.

The Joiners - photo by Philip C on Yelp

Florence Welch told the Sunday Times (15 June 2018) that the museum was the Horniman in Forest Hill:

'I think that song is about this… blink, almost. I was on the roof of the Horniman Museum, being a teenager, you know ‘woah’. Then I blinked, and 4 albums later, it’s “oh my God, there’s a whole other section of life I’m supposed to figure out. When do I do that?”. Obviously that's got lots of people thinking about the logistics and dangers of climbing on the roof - the main building is very high, maybe she meant the single storey grass roofed library building? Or maybe she used her Flo Fairy wings to hover up...

In another song on the album, 'Grace', Flo sings 'I don't think it would be too long before I was drunk in Camberwell again'. Hey hon we've all been there.

Florence did a photo shoot at William Morris's Red House in Bexley for recent Observer piece
(photo by Phil Fisk)

Makes me feel old but it's nearly ten years since I predicted that 2009 would be the year that 'red-headed young women from South London conquer the world' referring to Florence and La Roux. The latter's been a bit out of the limelight of late but has recently totally lifted the Whyte Horses track 'The Best of It' with a guest vocal.

Horniman Merman on QI

The  curious'Merman' figure from the Horniman Museum in Forest Hilll featured in a recent episode of QI, with Stephen Fry and guests including Sara Pascoe, Josh Widdicombe, Phill Jupitus and Alan Davies discussing this strange beast.

As Fry mentions, recent testing has confirmed that the figure was made from fish body parts supplemented with wood and papier mache. During the programme, both Davies and Pascoe mention visiting the Horniman, with Pascoe saying that she lives nearby.

Sara Pascoe, Phil Jupitus and the Horniman Merman.

Althea Gyles (1868-1949), poet and artist: 'A Strange Red Haired Girl'

Althea Gyles (right) with Irish revolutionist Constance Markiewicz

The Irish poet and artist Althea Gyles (1868-1949) was born in County Waterford and moved to London in 1892. She knew Oscar Wilde, W B Yeats (who described her as "a strange red-haired girl, all whose thoughts were set upon painting and poetry"), Constance Markiewicz, Aleister Crowley (with whom she had an affair), Compton McKenzie and many other interesting people, and is best known for her book designs for Yeats, Ernest Dowson (now buried in Ladywell Cemetery), Wilde and others. For a period she was associated with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (famously connected to the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill), and was later interested in vegetarianism and Buddhism.

Gyles' cover design for Yeats' The Secret Rose (1897)

Sympathy - Althea Gyles (1898)

The colour gladdens all your heart;
You call it Heaven, dear, but I -
Now Hope and I are far apart -
Call it the sky.

I know that Nature's tears have wet
The world with sympathy; but you,
Who know not any sorrow yet,
Call it the dew.

She spent her later years in South London, including in Brixton, Sydenham (one of her last homes was at 19 Tredown Road SE26) and at a nursing home in Beckenham at 69 Crystal Palace Park Road where she died in 1949.

In Jad Adams' biography of Ernest Dowson (Madder Music, Stronger Wine, 2000) he writes: ‘Althea Gyles lived on... her flaming hair now grey.. She lived in bedsits in Tulse Hill and then Sydenham, casting horoscopes as the new century wore on, until she became a ghost from the 1890s in war-shattered London.’

"Lilith" by Althea Gyles, from 'The Dome' vol.I, Oct.-Dec. 1898

(The most detailed account of Gyles' life that I have found online is in 'Althea Gyles’ Symbolic (De)Codification ofWilliam Butler Yeats’ ‘Rose and Wind Poetry’' by Arianna Antonielli)

Related posts:

AE Waite and the Horniman

Beatrice Offor of Sydenham

WB Yeats, Mona Bergson and the Forest Hill Visions

Camberwell and Crowley

Yeats in London

We are coming up to the 150th anniversary of the birth of the great Irish poet W.B. Yeats - he was born in Sandymount, County Dublin on 13 June 1865.

Yeats spents some very formative years in London, and next month at South East London Folklore Societu. Yeats authority Niall McDevitt will be giving a talk on 'Yeats in London'.

As mentioned at Transpontine before, there's an interesting connection between W.B. Yeats and the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill. He also visited Madame Blavatsky in Norwood, and spoke at Southwark Irish Literary Club. Hopefully there will be some more South London connections

Wednesday, May 13th 8:00pm, The Old King's Head, The Kings Yard, 45 Borough High Street, SE1 1NA

Talk starts at 8pm. £3/1.50 concession

To be sure of a place you can email nigelofbermondsey@gmail.com to book

(facebook event details)

Forest Hill Street Art: the Walrus

Mural at former bakers' shop at 43 Dartmouth Road, SE23. Commissioned last year by the Forest Hill Society, it refers of course to the famous walrus in the nearby Horniman Museum. 

The butterflies are Papilio hornimani (Horniman's Swallowtail), a species first identified in Frederick Horniman's collection and named after him.

A late 19th century cartoon of  F.J. Horniman, complete with butterfly net
(reproduced from Learning at the Museum Frontiers: Identity, Race & Power
by Viv Golding

Bine ati venit la Londra de Sud - Romanian Eggs in Lewisham

Bine ati venit la Londra de Sud  - that's 'Welcome to South London' in Romanian (according to Google translate anyway).

The press/politician scaremongering about a Romanian invasion of the UK on 1 January 2014 has not been matched by reality has it? But a collection of Romanian painted eggs have made it into Lewisham library. The eggs, decorated as part of an Easter custom, have been loaned to the library by the Horniman Museum. They are currently on display at Lewisham, and will be moving on to Downham library on 4th February.

Next Saturday 25 January  there will be a Romanian eggs day of activities from 12 noon to 4pm at Lewisham Library (199 Lewisham High Street, SE13 6LG), with family reading sessions, craft, object handling and curator talks. Admission Free.

Siouxsie at the South Bank - and Horniman Juju

I wasn't  quite sure what to expect at the Siouxsie gig at the Royal Festival Hall on Monday night. I thought it might be one of those polite 'an audience with...' sit down South Bank affairs, where ageing punks perform interpretations of Jacques Brel and Kurt Weill and labour through the Great American Songbook. But no, as soon as she came on and started with Happy House everyone stood up and stayed up for nearly two hours-  there was actual pogoing upstairs in the stalls and dancing in the aisles. Siouxsie and her band played the whole of the Banshees' Kaleidoscope album and much more, finishing with the great Spellbound as second encore. The gig was part of  Yoko Ono's Meltdown, and Yoko was in the Royal Box, standing and clapping for Siouxsie's version of Dear Prudence (which of course John Lennon wrote).

photo by jamesalternation at Slicing Up Eyeballs

The setlist for those interested was:

1. “Happy House”
2. “Tenant”
3. “Trophy”
4. “Hybrid”
5. “Clockface”
6. “Lunar Camel”
7. “Christine”
8. “Desert Kisses”
9. “Red Light”
10. “Paradise Place”
11. “Skin”
12. “Eve White/Eve Black”
13. “Israel”
14. “Arabian Knights”
15. “Cities in Dust”
16. “Dear Prudence”
17. “Loveless”
18. “Face to Face”
19. “Careless Love”
20. “Here Comes the Day”
21. “Into a Swan”
22. "Spellbound"




(She played the same set on Saturday night without Spellbound as second encore)

Juju and the Horniman Museum

I have been reading 'Siouxsie & The Banshees: the authorised biography' by Mark Paytress (2003). Of course there's lots in the early days about  Chislehurst (where Siouxsie grew up) and the 'Bromley Contingent' from which the band emerged. But there are also a few other interesting connections further into South London. 

The band's original drummer, not counting Sid Vicious for one gig, was Kenny Morris who packed in a course at Camberwell College of Art to play on the band's first two albums. Steve Severin, bassist and co-songwriter, was living with his friend Simon Barker in Bermondsey/Borough during the lead up to the 1980 Kaleidoscope album, and wrote the music for 'Christine' in that Southwark Council flat. But I was most interested to read about the origins of the African image on the cover of the 1981 album Juju (which includes Spellbound and Arabian Nights). According to Severin, 'we saw a definite thread running through the songs, almost a narrative to the album as a whole. The African statue on the cover, which we found in the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill, was the starting point for a lot of the imagery'. Interesting to wonder how many songs, stories, visions and more have been incubated in the Horniman over the years.

Perienne Christian

Brockley-based artist Perienne Christian was interviewed in The Standard this week, as the last person to model for the recently departed Lucian Freud. 'Freud's final muse... was the last in a long line of sitters to spend hours under the forensic gaze of the artist who died last month at the age of 88. Ms Christian, herself an artist, today told the Standard of the "fun" and "mischief" of working for one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. She developed a close friendship with the painter outside the studio despite the 60-year age gap... She said: "I have lost a great friend. On a personal level he was great fun to be with, always full of lively conversation; stories of mischief and intrigue" (Standard 2 August 2011).

Christian's own works owe something to her SE London location, albeit an area transfigured in her drawings to a slightly more visionary landscape populated by Edenic figures. This fine example is called 'Horniman Gardens with Tulips':

© Perienne Christian