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David Selzer is a writer of poetry, prose fiction, screenplays and stage plays. He embraces digital platforms to share his work of more than fifty years… READ MORE
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AMONG THE MUSES
As city ramparts and castle keeps do, so
civic building make statements – like that Attic,
Victorian temple in central London,
that bastion of imperial grandeur,
the British Museum, built to exhibit
stolen goods, and colonise the Muses,
designed by someone with the surname Smirke,
with the profits from coal, steam, and the Slave Trade.
Along its entire front elevation,
which includes two wings, is a wide, high
arcade whose open side is supported by
twenty four fluted Doric columns.
In the arcade, at appropriate
intervals for quiet and privacy,
are surprisingly comfortable wooden seats,
ergonomically and otherwise ideal
for ancients on a hot, humid, windless day
in late August London – while family
join the flocks, hordes of visitors to see
mummy cloths, and fragments of clay tablets.
The seat we have is probably the best
in the city. Across the courtyard
through the railings are plane trees in full leaf,
and red double decker buses and black cabs
jammed on Great Russell Street – which, like all
the streets and squares in the neighbourhood,
is named for an English aristocrat.
We observe the queue at the main gate –
multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, like London
with its more than three hundred languages,
a rich, ironic legacy of Empire.
The Museum – from the Greek mouseion,
‘seat of the Muses’ – is dressed in Portland Stone
quarried by convicts from Portland gaol Dorset.
There is no muse of architecture, nor
of prisoners or slaves, so I shall invoke
Clio, the muse of History, with her
open book and her clock!
3 responses to “AMONG THE MUSES”
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David, You have reminded me of the time when I rented a beautiful building at 30 Museum Street for ten years from 1979. It is all quite different now of course, mostly cafés, smart galleries, souvenir shops and very expensive clothes shops. Back then, opposite our building were three publishers, Sidgwick & Jackson and Allen & Unwin (both then independent) and a branch of the old Dutch publisher EJ Brill. On the corner of Gilbert Place was Luigi’s always busy steam-filled café which he ran with his two brothers, and where you could buy a slap-up lunch for £3, entertainment by Luigi inclusive.
Together with a colleague, I had just left Mitchell Beazley, a Soho based publisher, and had opened a photographic agency and started publishing illustrated books. Later, we opened London’s first commercial photographic gallery. We had rented the whole building for just £12,000 a year, with no bank or personal guarantees required, just the first quarter’s payment up front. I can’t imagine how one could achieve that now, for a building just 100 yards from the British Museum.
Our Landlord, whose urbane agent came each quarter to collect the rent and to share a cup of coffee, was Unigate Dairies of Trowbridge in Wiltshire who owned a number of the buildings in the area, including one of the early Pizza Express restaurants on the corner of Coptic Street and the former dairy which had been converted into an artist’s studio by Howard Hodgkin and next door John Frieda the hairstylist had opened his office. The street, undivided and not pedestrianised back then, had the feeling of a village, and we knew many of our neighbours, and some from around the corner in Great Russell Street whom we would often meet in the small sandwich bar down the street.
I imagine it was because I was so busy, and still commuting daily from Bath, that in all the years that I worked there, I never actually found time to visit The British Museum!
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The propaganda of architecture came before the alphabet.
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I often marvel at how you manage to pull together historic connections.
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