This feature first appeared in February 2025 on Londonist: Time Machine, our much-praised history newsletter. To be the first to read new history features like this, sign up for free here.
“Has anyone who is anybody ever been to Bethnal Green?,” asked the editorial.
“Before the Museum was opened… I question whether one in a thousand Londoners living west, south, or north of Gracechurch-Street ever knew of such a locality except perhaps as the home of certain French Huguenot weavers.”
The venue in question was the East London Museum of Science and Art, otherwise known as the Bethnal Green Museum. It opened in 1872, and it really was a shock to the system. The people of the East End had never before had such a treasure house in their midst, while the people of the West End were finally lured east into terra incognito.
Inside the museum, the classes mixed like nowhere else. As another report described it: “…statesmen and peers, highborn and fashionable belle, jostling and being jostled by butchers, bakers, candlestick-makers, by costermongers, hand-loom weavers, bird fanciers and their wives.”
The first correspondent exaggerates somewhat. Much more than “one in a thousand” Londoners would have heard of Bethnal Green. You only had to pick up a newspaper to read about the overcrowding and abysmal living conditions in the quarter. Henry Mayhew paints a representatively grim picture in 1850:
“An almost total lack of drainage and sewerage was made worse by the ponds formed by the excavation of brickearth. Pigs and cows in back yards, noxious trades like boiling tripe, melting tallow, or preparing cat’s meat, and slaughter houses, dustheaps, and ‘lakes of putrefying night soil’ added to the filth.”
Few would venture there from wealthier parts of London. Even Dickens, arguably the greatest London explorer of all time, mentions the district only twice in all his novels, and not pleasantly. Bethnal Green is “a rather difficult country” in Our Mutual Friend; it serves as the base for his most spiteful villain, Bill Sikes, in Oliver Twist.
But this was also a traduced neighbourhood. Yes, there was poverty, crime and insanitary conditions. But that was true of many quarters of London at the time. The East End and Bethnal Green were ‘othered’ thanks to their distance and unfamiliarity. Its denizens, poor though they were, included the hard-working weavers, turners, furniture makers and dockers upon whose labour the metropolis depended.
Then, in 1872, something remarkable happened. This much-denigrated neighbourhood suddenly became fashionable. A museum had opened.
The arts move eastward
The “East End Museum”, as it was originally styled, was one of the biggest culture shocks in London’s history. Its origins lie, as with so much of our museum sector, in the Great Exhibition of 1851. The profits from that show were funnelled into the development of South Kensington, which became the major hub of arts, crafts, science and engineering we still enjoy today. At its centre was the Victoria and Albert Museum, founded initially in a series of iron-framed sheds nicknamed “the Brompton boilers” because of their industrial appearance.
It was always the directors’ intentions that satellite branches of the museum should be built in other parts of town, to bring objects of art to the widest possible audience. Bethnal Green was first in line. Future Prime Minister William Gladstone had suggested the idea as early as 1851. The cause was then taken forward by local lobbyists, who went so far as to acquire land close to Bethnal Green church.
It would take until 1868 before all the ducks were in a row and construction could begin. Even then, a succession of logistical and financial issues delayed completion until 1872. At least the structure came cheap. The old ‘Brompton boilers’ were coming down to make way for a grander building, so one of the steel frames with transported over to Bethnal Green to house the new venture (see my map of ‘buildings that moved’). Architect James Wild clad the frame in red bricks, and a team of women from Woking Prison apparently tiled the floor.
The press, on the whole, welcomed this new venue, but that’s not to say that questions weren’t raised. “Doubtless it will be very instructive for the inhabitants of Bethnal Green to go and study Egyptian antiquities,” ventured one newspaper, “but what if the Bethnal Green weaver… has three or four shrunken and haggard children at home in a state of semi-starvation.” It’s the familiar “the money could be better spent…” argument, which is (rightly) aired for any cultural investment, then as now. As we’ll see, though, it seems like the decision was a positive one.
The opening day
The museum was finally ready to open on 24 June 1872. Such was the moment that the Prince and Princess of Wales (future King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra) were happy to lend their presence to the occasion.
The royals processed through a city canopied with bunting amid huge cheering crowds, the likes of which had only been seen on jubilees and coronations. By the time they reached Bethnal Green — an area never previously troubled by Royal boot or carriage wheel — the throng was immense. “As thickly stowed as they could stand”, went one report. A wooden platform had been erected between St John’s church and the new museum so that local children could see the Royal procession over the crowd.
It was a joyous occasion by all accounts. Well, all accounts except the one in The Telegraph, whose sensationalist reportage cast the East-enders as sub-human.
“Here yesterday, female ugliness of face and form, in blank monotonous, unvarying typification, was predominant. Sickly mothers nursing sickly babies; listless emaciated middle-aged women, as ugly as sin, who looked as though they supported nature on a diet of lucifer matches and gin…”
And so it goes on, over many dehumanising paragraphs. The write-up is vile to modern eyes and, indeed, was considered so at the time. The Telegraph’s account sparked anger among the populace and was rightly called-out in the wider press.
But back to the celebrations. The occasion had not only attracted thousands of cheering East-enders, but also the ‘great and good’ of the land. Their Royal Highnesses were backed up by the Dukes of Edinburgh and Cambridge; a Churchill or two; Mrs Gladstone; Sir Henry Cole; the Bishop of London; and even General Robert Schenck, representing the United States.
Crowds of every class squeezed into the iron-framed museum to witness the official opening. The royal proclamation was aurally bookended by choirs, trumpet blasts and the Honourable Artillery Company’s band. It must have been quite the cacophony, trembling along the barrel-vaulted roof.
The royal party spent an hour perusing the fine art collections. They then returned to Marlborough House via Cambridge Heath and the Hackney Road — a route that must have been novel to the coachmen.
How to visit if you find yourself back in 1872
The museum directors wanted this to be a space for all. Free tickets could be gained on most days, and the doors would regularly stay open until 10pm. These measures allowed even the poorest to visit. As for the rich, Lord Snooty McSnootface or Lady Cholmondley-Swankbaffle might prefer Wednesdays, when the 6d entrance fee would form a financial bulwark against the smelly folk.
Most West-enders, though, were happy to visit on the free-entry days. According to one report, many fashionable Londoners came with “…a wish to see the population of the district as well as the pictures and other precious objects of art”. ‘Poverty tourism’ was very much a thing in Victorian London.
Those not wealthy enough to travel by coach could catch the train. The Central line had yet to be imagined, let alone built, but nearby Cambridge Heath station opened just four weeks before the museum. At a stroke, Bethnal Green had gone from an obscure backwater on the edge of town, to a place with rapid transport links and a popular cultural hub.
If the well-heeled were curious about the down-at-heel East-enders, then the interest was reciprocated. According to one report, a month after opening:
“The Bethnal Greenites have not only a new museum to enjoy, but the aspects of the visitors who come to it from afar. The equipages and their inmates who drive up to the gates of the museum, with or without powdered footmen behind, and coachmen in cauliflowered wigs before, are objects of unceasing interest to the juvenile and to much of the adult population of the neighbourhood of the building. The visages of the onlookers display respect, mingled with the keenest curiosity. There has not been time enough for that familiarity which in ill-regulated minds breeds con-tempt.”
A free museum in the East End was a laudable and welcome initiative. But many thought the museum could do even more to allow the working class to visit. A vociferous campaign was launched to change the law, and allow the museum to open on Sunday afternoons — the only daylight time when the working class were neither working nor, theoretically, in church. The motion was resisted on religious grounds, so many workers had to make do with evening visits.
The mixing of the classes
Evidently, the poor did find time to visit the museum, and in large numbers. After three months, it was estimated that 700,000 people had popped in, “chiefly… the inhabitants of this wretched suburb”, sniped one newspaper. 27,000 visited on the Bank Holiday alone. If we can believe that figure (and I’m not entirely sure we can), then it would easily outnumber the current daily attendance of the British Museum (~16,000 people), the UK’s most popular visitor attraction.
The newspapers, of course, were keen to make an exhibit out of these noviciate culturalists:
“The visitors are the sight; … you find yourself continually gazing at the spectators. Nineteen-twentieths of them are evidently very poor. The number of children is prodigious; they stare about them with the same wonderment that a rustic would display if suddenly introduced into some fairy palace. A great many of them are dirty. Some even are ragged. Yet you cannot help thinking that the sight of so much of the highest art of beauty in its highest ideal must have an elevating, refining influence upon these natures. The great majority of the visitors, I should think, have never seen a picture, except in the shop windows or on a sign-board. Now they see the greatest inspirations of painter and sculptor.”
The preponderance of children in the museum is a common theme in such reports. Their acceptance at the museum was extended to the very smallest, and here we find a rare 19th century account of public breastfeeding, albeit couched in sumptuously Victorian language:
“Here and there in the interior of the building, the interesting spectacle may be observed of fond maternity busily engaged in that nutritive process which is “generally necessary” to the support of infant humanity, whether high or humbly born.”
It’s cheering to read that the future Museum of Childhood and now Young V&A welcomed kids from the very beginning.
So what was actually in this museum?
The wonderment started outside the building. A preposterously ornate majolica fountain towered 10 metres into the air, a refugee from the 1862 International Exhibition in South Kensington. Even its water was remarkable by local standards. It “… must have given many an East-ender, habituated to the same fluid from slimy butts and unventilated tanks, an itching of thirst, so clear and cool did it look”. (The fountain is long gone, sadly.)
Inside, the visitor would discover a motley collection of displays from various sources, including leftovers from the Great Exhibition, and a particularly lauded loan of French art from Sir Richard Wallace (he of the Wallace Collection). This amounted to 1,000 objects, including paintings, porcelain and decorative furniture. The Prince of Wales also chipped in, loaning the museum some of the gifts he’d received from India.
Besides fine arts and royal trinkets, the curious punter could enjoy the tantalisingly named “Animal Products Collection,” a worthy display that encompassed farming, nutrition and “the various applications of animal substances to industrial purpose”. Needless to say, everyone wandered upstairs to look at the paintings.
These were something special, and a large part of the reason so many toffs bothered to carriage-it-over from Mayfair. “We are surely making decided progress in art education,” wrote one correspondent, “when Bethnal-green, which is said to be a synonym for want and squalor, has become associated with the works of Reubens, Rembrandt, Teniers, Ruysdael, Titian, Gainsborough, and Reynolds.”
The museum has continued to serve Londoners of all classes and compass-points right into our own times. In 1974, it shifted focus from being a general outpost of the V&A to become the Museum of Childhood. In 2023, it rebranded and remodelled its displays to become Young V&A. It remains free to visit.
Now, anyone who is anyone has been to Bethnal Green.
Note on sources: I’ve used dozens of reports from contemporary newspapers to piece this together. I don’t want to slow down the text with lots of links or references, but the interested reader can easily find the sources by searching for the appropriate text on either the British Newspaper Archive or Newspapers.com.
