Visions of the Great White South: Cambridge in Bonhams

Last week we went along for a tour of the Polar Museum's pop-up exhibition at Bonhams, Visions of the Great White South. Curated by Charlotte Connolly, the exhibition brings together art and images from the Scott Polar Expedition, alongside contemporary art commissioned by the Scott Polar Research Institute. We live tweeted the tour and now you can get a sneak peak here. The exhibition is only on until this Friday August 19th and we highly recommend a visit! 

From the bustle of Bond Street to the silence of the Pole #greatwhitesouth @scottpolar @bonhams1793

We love whenever regional museums get to showcase their collections in London, so of course we had to get down and see what the Polar Museum was doing on Bond Street! Maybe a strange choice of venue for a display of (not for sale) historic images- or so we thought.

Kicking of the tour with curator @curatorconnelly from @scottpolar - a research institute which also has a historic collection

Actually I didn't really know very much about the Polar Research Institute aside from that they had a museum. It's worth looking up the really interesting work they do - polar research not just a thing from the early twentieth century! 

Exhibition features work from the official artists of the Scott Polar Exhibition inspired by his work Broken Ice

Curator Charlotte Connolly was inspired by this image from the Terra Nova Expedition's official camera artist, Herbert Ponting. Ponting actually created a documentary about the expedition called the Great White Silence. 

Exhibition also includes beautiful water colours by artist and scientist EA Wilson

But Ponting wasn't alone in capturing the Pole- the exhibition also had along watercolour artist and scientist EA Wilson. This image features a very teeny tiny church on top of the outcropping built by the expedition team. 

Herbert Ponting - the camera artist on the expedition, captured everyday life for an explorer at Cape Evans

Ponting was really a 'camera artist' rather than a purely scientific photographer. He also took pictures of everyday life on the expedition, as well as stunning portraits. This one was taken just as this man returned from a push towards the Pole. 

Apparently Captain Scott became quite a good photographer on the expedition - @curatorconnelly with his work

In the eyes of Captain Scott, it was important that all members of the expedition were trained to be competent scientific photographers. Scott himself took to photography, and the exhibition features a number of images taken by him, including some very early panoramic photos. 

Wilson and Ponting always wanted an exhibition together of their photos and watercolours - finally realised

Exhibition artists Ponting and Wilson had always hoped for a joint exhibition of their works, but Wilson died on the fated journey back from the Pole alongside Scott. Perhaps due to the grief of Wilson's widow, the exhibition never happened. Now some of their works have finally been reunited. 

So why are we in @bonhams1793? Because they sponsor @scottpolar artist in residence who travels to Antarctica

Well the big reveal- we are at Bonhams because they sponsor an artist-in-residence at the Polar Institute! These lucky artists get to travel down to the Pole each year to capture the science of polar exploration through art. These paintings were actually done by Captain Scott's granddaughter!

A closing note on the epic landscapes of Emma Stibbon @scottpolar #greatwhitesouth

The contemporary art portion of the exhibition is really stunning. I thought this was a photograph but its actually a drawing! Amazing to see how the Pole is still an inspiration for generations of artists. 

A fantastic mix of history, science and art we really can't recommend Visions of the Great White South enough! It's free to visit so just pop down to Bonhams anytime this week. There are even tours available this Friday: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/exhibition-tour-visions-of-the-great-white-south-tickets-26825554957

Sound of the underground: the Strand Station and LTM

Sometimes I wonder at how much control TFL has over our lives as Londoners. Whether it's kettled in Victoria station, a buss trike or a central line signal failure - well, let's just say most of us have a pretty complicated relationship with our transport authority. but TFL also has the amazing London transport museum- a journey through London's history on the carriage, omnibus, and steam-powered tube. and if that wasn't enough, well, TFL looks after heritage most of us don't even think about, including the deep mysterious depths of the tube system itself, including its ghost stations.

Finally after years of wanting to do one of London Transport Museum's oddly expensive transport themed special events, I finally managed to go on a guided tour of the Aldwych 'Secret Station'. The Aldwych station is not that secret really, if you've ever been to KCL or been on a bus down the Strand you've probably seen its red-tiled exterior. Maybe you even thought to yourself, it's pretty weird to have a station so near Temple, Embankment and Charring Cross. and you would be right - the Strand station (later Aldwych) was basically useless from its inception.

The strand station was originally a branch of the Piccadilly line, extending like a strange appendage from Holborn down to the Strand, originally built in 1907 mainly for theatre-goers. This arrangement seems somewhat baffling as the trains only ran every 9 minutes and it takes about the same time to just walk up the Kingsway. Ten years later in 1917, they closed one of the platforms due to lack of demand. Actually they didn't even finish tiling the platform that was in use because they didn't think there would ever be enough people down there to even notice. The station itself closed in 1994 when TFL realised it was frequented by a whopping 450 people per day (compared with Holborn which received about 31 million annually).

Actually the Aldwych station was more interesting closed than open. It became a bomb shelter in the Blitz and it's disused platform was used to store artwork including the Elgin marbles! I particularly enjoyed that the station was used for experiments in tube design including poster and tile patterns. Now the station is used mostly for filming as well as training emergency services staff.

All in all, TFL's exciting 'Secret Station' was really just a dinky little half-cocked Edwardian dream that they knew was going to fail even as they built it. But hey if they hadn't gone through with it where would we film Mr Selfridge?

Exploring the Sick City of London

At the Ministry we love meeting, promoting and participating in all of the exciting multi-disciplinary projects that London has to offer. From Museums Showoff to UCL Researchers in Museums there are so many interesting people doing great things at the moment. So it was only a matter of time before we heard about the Sick City Project supported by the Wellcome Trust. Organized by Wellcome Engagement Fellow Dr. Richard Barnett, the Sick City Project takes the history of medicine in London to the streets. 

Starting out our snowy tour at the Royal College
of Surgeons in Lincolns Inn Field

Building on the cultural and historical geography of our great city, the Sick City projects aims to engage the imagination my immersing participants in the history of medicine by bringing them directly to the places where it happened. Why read about medicine in London when you could walk the streets walked by the historic persons themselves? Get out of the library and get into history!

Heading up the strand towards the heart
of the City 

Sick City offers a variety of tours from exploring tropical diseases in Greenwich to the sex trade of Soho, but I opted to attend Richard Barnett’s ‘Sensational Bodies’ walk organized through the Museum of London. Accompanying the ‘Doctors, Dissection and Resurrection Men’ exhibition, Barnett took us on a tour of anatomical teaching in the heart of London, covering the rise of the surgery from the four humours to the foundation of the Royal College of Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Even living in London, it’s sometimes hard to really appreciate the physical closeness of medical London. But walking from Holborn along the Strand to St Paul’s and St Bartholomew’s Hospital, its easy to see how the trade in bodies and anatomical knowledge was linked. Surgeons and student, physicians and booksellers, body snatchers and the poor, all milled together within a claustrophobic two miles at the centre of the city.

You can see why people weren't too keen on dissection
in the early eighteenth century. 

I was also thrilled by the amount of emphasis Barnett placed on the importance of the two brothers who revolutionized surgery and anatomy teaching in the 18^th century: William and John Hunter. I know I am incredibly biased, but it made me happy. I also learned that the Hunters’ pioneering anatomy school in Covent Garden was located right where the Apple store is today. The history of London is all around us, if only we knew where to look. Throw in a ghost story or two, and I was one happy girl (despite the terrible weather- a danger of any outdoor adventure in London).

Without sounding like too much of an advertisement (note that the Ministry is not affiliated with Sick City!), you’d be crazy not to try and get yourself on one of these walks! You can find out more about the project at sickcityproject.wordpress.com plus download their app, podcasts and see future Sick City events. You can also follow them on twitter @SickCityProject.