#backyard museums

Hatfield House

Here is a country mansion tucked away into the green woods and whitewashed pathways of Hertfordshire. It is a confection of gilded ceilings and brocade curtains, of stained glass and chequerboard floors and wood-panelled walls; a pastiche of styles: Jacobean, Elizabethan, Tudor: there is a bedroom with pistachio green walls and canary yellow drapes styled after Chinoiserie; the gold-leaved ceilings of the long gallery are inspired of Venice; the old palace that sits besides is a prime example of medieval red brickwork from centuries past.

In former days that palace was the childhood home of Elizabeth I, and though it hosted all of Henry VIII’s children for a time, and was passed then down the Salisbury line along with the rest of the estate, it is Elizabeth that Hatfield is known best for. Each room carries its Elizabethan relics; ciphered letters, books, tapestries, but most famous of all—on the far side of the Marble Hall—is the Rainbow Portrait. 

Tudor paintings are rich with symbolism, and the portraits of Elizabeth I are textbook to the subject. The Rainbow Portrait is one such archetypal painting. In it a serpent coils around Elizabeth’s arm in a symbol of wisdom. The pearls strung around her neck symbolise virginity, for she was known as the virgin queen, as she would not marry and cede her throne to her husband king. Her gown is embroidered with eyes and ears—she sees all and hears all, in her kingdom—and though she was near seventy when this was painted, she is depicted with preternatural youth. In her hand she holds a rainbow, inscribed non sine sole iris: ‘without the sun there is no rainbow’, a message of peace and prosperity, though that to me seems a little more abstract an interpretation. 

Grant Museum of Zoology

The casual visitor of UCL’s zoological collections is greeted first by the most unlikely of exhibits: a jar of moles. It sets the tone quite well for the rest of the museum; quaint, antiquated and wonderfully memorable—from the cookie cutter shark jaws to the manatee skeletons, the microscope slide lightbox to the plastic toy dinosaurs affectionately kept behind glass and beside an ichthyosaur fossil, as if somehow the two things are equally prized. There is a low hum of chatter through the museum: even at its busiest, it is mostly empty—and there’s something to be said for empty museums with crowded displays, something cathartic and incredibly precious. 

The Natural History Museum at Tring, Hertfordshire

A quaint museum in the quiet of the countryside: the zoological collections of Walter Rothschild, a baron of Victorian Britain. Here is a menagerie of taxidermy specimens, with all manner of exotic animals therein: some extinct, others bred strange – all frozen in lifelike precision, and most offering baleful, glassy–eyed stares towards the observer. Grainy grey photographs of zebra–drawn carriages dot the exhibits: the rider – peer, politician and pioneer all – wears a merry smile and holds a thin whip. 

Behind the beauty of glass–wrapped mahogany cabinets is the ever–present colonial legacy: the curios of the age of exploration, and the plunderers who brought them hence; the scientific legacy in geology and natural history, and the marring of humanity hand in hand. So too go fascination and disquiet, inextricably linked in the timelessness of these halls. 

For my part, the science is a siren–call: the iridescent plumes of paradise–birds, the observable hyperphalangy on skeletal whales, the geographical fingerprints offered by ungulate coat–patterns. Another day, I will return: sketchpad in hand; and scrawl out my observations as if I were a scientist of old, happening upon a new and strange species. Today I return only with my musings, and here I put them, to be forgotten ere I wake tomorrow. 

The Verulamium Museum, St Albans

Among the green pastures and crooked roads of modern–day St Albans can be found the relics of Verulamium, city of Roman Britain some two thousand years past. The ruins of knapped flint walls emerge from the cropped grass of Verulamium Park; a ways away is a Roman hypocaust, still intact; a little further still an amphitheatre, rubbled by weather and time. Most striking to me, though, were the mosaics: the Titan Oceanus, the Shell, the Lion and the Stag – all with still–bright tesserae of terracotta and grey and cream.