Banker’s Armani Suit Enters Museum in 20.5 Million-Pound Revamp
Armani Women's Suit
Museum of London via Bloomberg
An Armani women's suit at the Museum of London. The museum reopened this year after a 20.5 million pound ($32 million) refurbishment.
An Armani women's suit at the Museum of London. The museum reopened this year after a 20.5 million pound ($32 million) refurbishment. Source: Museum of London via Bloomberg
A gilded 1757 coach used by the Lord Mayor of London. The coach is on display in a special street-level window of the Museum of London. Source: Museum of London via Bloomberg
Jack Lohman, director of the Museum of London. The museum reopened this year after a 20.5 million pound ($32 million) redevelopment. Source: Museum of London via Bloomberg
An Armani woman’s suit, pinstriped and paired with a Hermes scarf, has entered the collections of the Museum of London, which has reopened after a 20.5 million pound ($32 million) revamp.
The suit was donated by a Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc banker, together with the corporate trophy she won for clinching a 20-million-pound deal. It’s one of many ways that the institution -- a chronicler of London that sits at the heart of the City financial district -- is moving into the 21st century.
“We’re bringing the museum up to date, but we’re not making it into a history lesson,” says director Jack Lohman. “That type of museum can be understood as patronizing.”
The Museum of London’s lower galleries, which display items from 1666 to now, have just emerged from a three-year revamp, more than half of it funded by Lottery money, and the rest by public bodies and charities including Vivien Duffield’s Clore Duffield Foundation and the Dr. Mortimer and Theresa Sackler Foundation.
The museum is now very much of the moment. Hanging over its buzzy basement lobby is a circular LED display that flashes random on-the-minute news about London (“Bakerloo Line: Part Suspended”). A street-level vitrine with the Lord Mayor’s gilded 1757 coach is lit up at night, advertising what’s inside.
Violet Tie
The new sections cater to younger audiences, not scholars, and that’s fine by the museum’s director: 52-year-old Jack Lohman, who joined in 2002. When we meet in the eatery next door, Lohman wears an Oswald Boateng suit with a violet tie.
The institution, which opened in 1976, “was a very worthy museum,” says Lohman, “very serious in its expertise, like it is now. But it wasn’t so relaxed about seeing lots of different people.”
Location was an impediment: In a business area off the tourist trail, it lacked street-level access, and still does. Visitor numbers reflected that: In the year ended March 31, 2007, before its partial closure, the museum drew 376,920 visitors, a fraction of Tate’s.
The audience Lohman now courts is “the learning family,” with children a key target, and he has made the new-look museum entertaining without being lowbrow. Collections that once stopped at 1914 now extend to the present.
Antique Bank
The liveliest are the 18th- and 19th-century sections. A dungeon-like prison cell from around 1750 -- once part of a real-life house of detention near the Tower of London -- has been put on show, its wooden walls still etched with 18th- century prisoners’ names. Outside it, kids can reach out and touch a period padlock, key and chain to get a sense of the past. It’s like being in a real-life Disneyland.
Nearby is a Victorian village with a tiled barber shop, a tobacconist, a pub, a milliner and a genuine Barings bank office. All have original fittings and contents.
Lohman was born in London to Polish parents, both museum designers. “My father dropped dead suddenly, unexpectedly, and I took over running his business,” says Lohman, who was in his 20s at the time.
From 1985 to 1994, he developed museums and exhibitions for English Heritage, which oversees 300 abbeys, castles and ruin sites in England. He has worked in Macau, Ethiopia, Brazil and South Africa, where he was chief executive officer of Cape Town’s 15-strong complex of Iziko Museums. From there, he was hired for London because “I was a passionate Londoner,” Lohman says.
‘Wrong Story’
A polyglot, he speaks French and German, as well as Swedish, Spanish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Italian and Polish -- and is learning Arabic. Had he not run a museum, Lohman would have been a translator, he says.
His next project: to rejuvenate the Roman galleries, which, he says, “tell the wrong story: It’s an out-of-date story.” The museum, whose archaeological teams make new finds all the time, has recently uncovered a huge Roman amphitheater in South London, and tombs in Spitalfields, east London.
“I don’t want to see precious little buttons in a case, thank you,” says Lohman, beaming behind his signature frames. “I want to feel what it was like to be in the streets of London in the Roman times.”
“I want to do the Roman army in 3-D, like going to see ‘Avatar.’”
To contact the writer on this story: Farah Nayeri in London at Farahn@bloomberg.net.
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