Thrills, spills and creepy exhibits: It's playtime for a big Cockney kid
London is an ever-changing beast, but nowhere has it changed more and in so short a time than in its east. Not so long ago, guidebooks got as far as Tower Bridge and stopped. Beyond that the maps might just as well have borne the legend, "Here be dragons."
Today, Shoreditch, Brick Lane, Bow and Hackney are almost beyond trendy – which makes going back all the more fraught. Honestly, you turn your back for 20 years …
One place I thought would never change was the V&A Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green. Opened in 1872 by the then Prince of Wales, it was at that time a simple museum. It was only in the 1920s that it began to focus on children and not until 1974 did it officially become a specialist museum of childhood. By that time, though, the damage had been done; generations of local children had been dragged through it kicking and screaming. For, trust me, there's only so much curiosity a snotty-faced Cockney kid can convincingly manifest in Victorian doll's houses.
In my memory, the museum lingers as a vast, spooky space filled with creepy-eyed dolls and glass cabinets of blank-faced mannequins wearing the stuffy, faux, grown-up attire into which 19th-century parents used to stuff the seen-but-not-heard generation.
Anyway, you can see where this is going. On a recent visit to the UK I went back, one of the 400,000 visitors who pass (free) through its doors every year. The big difference? Well, it seems my childhood is now part of the permanent exhibition. There's a chopper bike behind the glass as well as Scalextric racing car kits, Meccano sets, Action Man figurines and Dr Who memorabilia.
But apart from the rather queer and dispiriting feeling of seeing your own childhood displayed in a museum, it turns out to be fantastic fun and hours fly by in a fascinating blur. After all, this huge building has the largest collection of childhood objects in the United Kingdom. There are papier-mâché puppets, wind-up cars, battery-powered robots (including, pictured, a Robby the Robot replica from the 1956 film Forbidden Planet) and teddy bear collections.
All of this is alongside the weird and wonderful from the 19th century such as thaumatropes, zoetropes, phenakistoscopes and praxinoscopes, visual "toys" used to make still images move (imagine that!) by means of spinning drums, mirrors and string.
And while it's interesting to see that the first Xbox has made the grade, it's the older items that charm and chill. The collection of rocking horses is alluring but the puppet section, with its gruesome Sweeney Todd and creepy clown dolls, is downright alarming.
There are wind-up monkey dolls (circa 1870-1880) dressed in Louis XIV-type finery who play classical music, fierce-looking Japanese bunraku puppets and Indonesian shadow puppets throwing menacing shapes on the walls behind them.
In the doll's house section, there are intricate Victorian and Edwardian mansions, their frontages cast open to reveal the miniature intimacies within for all time. It looks as if the children who used to play with these masterpieces were spirited away mid-game.
To me, the creepiest exhibit is also one of the most beautiful. It's a peculiarly life-like doll which lies in state in a glass cabinet, a wonderfully realised baby boy with curly blond hair and pale blue eyes. He is wearing a simple, embroidered christening gown. Then you read the explanatory label: "Wax-headed baby doll, about 1900. Patrick Enrico Pierotti died as a baby. His father, the English dollmaker Charles Ernest Pierotti, made the doll as a portrait of him."
Not far from the corpse … sorry, life-size model of dead baby Pat Pierotti … is local artist Rachel Whiteread's celebrated work Place (Village). It's a large-scale artwork – now part of the permanent collection – of 150 doll's houses of various architectural styles that Whiteread collected over 20 years and assembled into a sprawling hillside "community". The houses are simple and traditional but Whiteread, herself a childhood visitor to the museum, has stripped out all the dolls and furniture, leaving behind deserted homes which are lit from within.
It was done, she says, so visitors can make up their own stories of the lives lived behind those un-twitched curtains: "If there was no one in there, you could think … what happened?"
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