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!
By David Selzer