Museum spotlight: Bow Street and Brunel

I was fortunate enough to be invited to check out two very different museums in London this week: the Bow Street Museum of Crime and Justice at Covent Garden, and the Brunel Museum at Rotherhithe.

Both are promoting very special artifacts. At Bow Street Museum is the dock in which Oscar Wilde, Dr Crippen, the Krays, and the suffragettes stood in the Magistrates Court. The Brunel Museum has the restored, Grade II* listed Thames Tunnel, now a performance and event space.

Five fast facts about Bow Street Museum of Crime and Justice

• Located on the site of the 1881 Bow Street Magistrates Court and Police Station
• The police station closed in 1992, the court in 2006
• A typical visit to the museum takes around 45-60 minutes
• The building is Grade II listed
• Oscar Wilde appeared in Court 2 in Apr 1895 and spent a night in the holding cells before being sent to The Old Bailey

Actor Alastair Whatley, who plays Wilde and other characters in the one-man play The Importance of Being Oscar, opening at Park Theatre this month, attended to launch the dock to the press, joined by Museum Director Simon Tansley.

It is always exciting to stand near or in spaces or items that date from the Victorian era. In the case of Bow Street’s dock, it languished forgotten and with 1960s plastic trim until the transformation of the court building into the 5* NoMad hotel that now occupies most of the rooms.

Saved from the skip, it has now been sympathetically restored thanks to National Lottery funding, and will form the centrepiece of the upcoming exhibition, Echoes of the Past. The Museum boasts the old police cells – including the drunk tank – as part of their offering, although the two main courtrooms are now respectively the hotel’s event space and a couple of bedrooms.

We were allowed to stand in the dock itself as part of the morning – a sobering experience, particularly regarding Wilde, who was plainly a victim of circumstance with his eventual conviction.

Five fast facts about Brunel Museum

• Opened in 1975, and restored when transferred to a charitable trust in 2001
• After 150 years, as of 2016, the ‘Grand Entrance Hall’ is now open every day for lectures and performances
• At the start of the Second World War, the Tunnel shaft was given a metal roof to prevent it becoming a bombing target; this now has a roof garden available for hire
• The museum is currently planning a new exhibition on Brunel’s last project, the SS Great Eastern, completed in 1859
• The Thames Tunnel shaft is Grade II* listed because of its Victorian soot, from the steam trains that went through from Dec 1869

At Brunel Museum, the main attractions are the exhibition space in the Old Engine Room, and the Thames Tunnel shaft. The tunnel took 18 years to build, between 1825 and 1843. It was envisioned to be accessible to horse and cart, but this proved impossible, and instead it became a way to cross the river for pedestrians, linking up with what is now Wapping station.

Back in 2014, I walked through the tunnel from Rotherhithe to Wapping, along the route now underneath the Museum’s space and part of the Windrush line. The architecture was deeply impressive, and the idea of this as an underwater shopping arcade as well as a quick route between stations was fascinating. Some photos I took on that day:

In 2011, a floor was added halfway down the tunnel, which now serves as a performance and event space. For the first 5 years of operation, access was by crawling through a hatch at the top with a descent via scaffolding – this even happened for weddings! Museum Director Katherine McAlpine shared with us some details about the space.

The tunnel is listed because of its original Victorian soot, and the base part of the tunnel still needs water to be pumped out each day. For the Brunel family, father and son Marc and Isambard, this was their first collaboration. It was Marc Isambard Brunel’s overarching vision, while Isambard Kingdom Brunel acted as resident engineer. Isambard went on to his first major structural design, the Wharncliffe Viaduct (1837) in Hanwell.