I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to post photographs of the new Museum of the Home which I was asked to see a week or so ago ahead of its official opening in mid-June. I was very impressed. It’s not at all an easy task to renovate the small rooms of an early eighteenth-century almshouse which were first laid out as a historical sequence of period rooms by Marjorie Quennell in the mid-1930s. Wright and Wright have dug down to produce a parallel set of rooms underneath which are much more thematic. The 1990s Branson Coates extension survives intact as the grand and very slightly flamboyant entrance hall from Hoxton Overground station. And so does the former pub building at the corner of Geffrye and Cremer Street, now a café called Molly’s after Molly Harrison who was the director of the Geffrye Museum as was in the 1950s. It struck me as a very intelligent and thoughtful set of interventions and I’m much looking forward to going back again in June and exploring further.

This is the new entrance ramp so that you now enter from the east:-

This is a view of the arts-and-crafts extension which was added at the back of the almshouses – I assume after the almshouses were acquired in 1911 by the LCC, opened as a Museum of the Furniture Trade in 1914:-

The gardens have been totally transformed and much improved as a place of public respite:-

And this is Molly’s which is already open for service of octopus and much else:-