| Horniman Museum and Gardens | |||||||||
| Map Type: | United Kingdom London Lewisham | ||||||||
| Visitors: | 952,954 (2019)[1] | ||||||||
| Location: | 100 London Road, Forest Hill London, 3PQ United Kingdom | ||||||||
| Website: | horniman.ac.uk
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The Horniman Museum and Gardens is a museum in Forest Hill, London, England. Commissioned in 1898, it opened in 1901 and was designed by Charles Harrison Townsend in the Modern Style.[2] It has displays of anthropology, natural history and musical instruments, and is known for its large collection of taxidermied animals. The building is Grade II* listed.
It is a non-departmental public body of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and is constituted as a company and registered charity under English law. In 2022 the museum won Museum of the Year, an award made by the Art Fund.
The museum was founded in 1901 by Frederick John Horniman. Frederick had inherited his father's Horniman's Tea business, which by 1891 had become the world's biggest tea trading business.[3]
The proceeds from the business allowed Horniman to indulge his lifelong passion for collecting, and which after travelling extensively had some 30,000 items in his various collections, covering natural history, cultural artefacts and musical instruments.
In 1911, an additional building to the west of the main building, originally containing a lecture hall and library, was donated by Frederick Horniman's son Emslie Horniman. This was also designed by Townsend. A new extension, opened in 2002, was designed by Allies and Morrison.[4]
The museum won the Art Fund's Museum of the Year award in 2022.[5] In November 2022, the museum returned a collection of 72 items that were stolen from the Kingdom of Benin, including Benin Bronzes, to Nigeria's National Commission for Museums and Monuments.[6]
The Horniman specialises in anthropology, natural history and musical instruments[7] and has a collection of 350,000 objects. The ethnography and music collections have Designated status. One of its most famous exhibits is the large collection of stuffed animals. It also has an aquarium noted for its .
The Horniman housed some of the Benin Bronzes until 28 November 2022, when they were signed back unconditionally to Nigeria, from where the pieces were looted in 1897 by British troops.[8] [9]
| Service | Station/Stop | Lines/Routes served | Distance from Horniman Museum |
|---|---|---|---|
| Horniman Museum | |||
| Horniman Park | 260m (850feet) walk[10] | ||
| 650m (2,130feet) walk[11] | |||
| Southern |
The museum is set in 16acres of gardens, which include the following features:
The gardens are also Grade II listed on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England.
On the London Road wall of the main building is a neoclassical mosaic mural entitled Humanity in the House of Circumstance, designed by Robert Anning Bell and assembled by a group of young women over the course of 210 days. Composed of more than 117,000 individual tesserae, it measures 10feet×32feetft (×ft) and symbolises personal aspirations and limitations.[12]
The three figures on the far left represent Art, Poetry and Music, standing by a doorway symbolising birth, while the armed figure represents Endurance. The two kneeling figures represent Love and Hope, while the central figure symbolises Humanity. Charity stands to the right bearing figs and wine, followed by white-haired Wisdom holding a staff, and a seated figure representing Meditation. Finally, a figure symbolising Resignation stands by the right-hand doorway, which represents death.[13]
A 20feet totem pole, carved from red cedar, stands outside the museum's main entrance. It was carved in 1985 as part of the American Arts Festival by Nathan Jackson, a Tlingit native Alaskan. The carvings on the pole depict figures from Alaskan legend of a girl who married a bear, with an eagle (Jackson's clan crest) at the top.[14] The pole is one of only a handful of totem poles in the United Kingdom, others being on display at the British Museum, the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, Windsor Great Park, Bushy Park, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford, and at Alsford's Wharf in Berkhamsted.[15] There is also a totem pole in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter. It is displayed in their World Cultures galleries.
The Horniman Museum contains the CUE (Centre for Understanding the Environment) building. This opened in 1996 and was designed by local architects Archetype using methods developed by Walter Segal. The building has a grass roof and was constructed from sustainable materials. It also incorporates passive ventilation.