Museum of the Home will reopen its doors this week having undergone a major six year renovation of their ‘Rooms Through Time' exhibition. The interactive installation features ‘Real Rooms’ that, through extensive research and community co-curation, strive to reflect the identity of the local community from 1879 to an imagined 2049. The newly refurbished exhibition now features seven new and permanent period rooms, which can all be interacted with by the public. They are like living television sets, nostalgic and rich with details and references. Like a really successful house museum – think Dennis Sever's house in Spitalfields or Charleston House in Sussex – the exhibition really captures a period, successfully transporting you to a time and place. The home is such an intimate and rare snapshot of a period of time and person, it feels bizarre that this museum remains the only museum dedicated to ‘the home’ in the world.
The aim of the Hoxton-based museum is to genuinely reflect the history of migration and housing throughout recent history. Whilst so many museums continue to operate at odds to their immediate surroundings, Museum of the Home wants to create a space which authentically records and tells the stories of locals.
They've done this incredibly effectively, using a combination of deep community-led research and narrative storytelling to curate seven rooms at various points in history. The renovation means the selection of rooms now represents a more varied selection of homes from the past, including a Jewish tenement flat from 1913, an Irish couple's house in the 1950s, LGBTQIA+ renters sharing an ex-council home in 2005, a British-Vietnamese home in 2024, and The Future Room, which explores real homes amid challenges such as the climate crisis and technological advances.
“We're an audience-first organisation,” explains Sonia Solicari, the first-ever female director of the museum. This was key from both an aesthetic point of view (all the rooms are incredibly detail-oriented and historically accurate) and an ethical perspective. For the Irish couple's room in a house from the 1956, for example, the museum worked closely with organisations like the London Irish Centre. The high-rise flat, she explains, was informed by open workshops facilitated by the organisation. “We work first with groups who are known to us, where there’s gaps we look to build those relationships with organisations," she tells us.
From there, the curators use a mosaic of advisers to build up a full and varied picture of a period of time. “We're always critical of our methodologies,” says Sonia, who believes in the importance of blending a myriad of perspectives in order to create a full image, "A child's perception of domestic space may be very informed by their age. And memory is also unreliable. So we supplement personal stories with design research, photos and paintings, before feeding them back through the lived experience lens.”
One of my favourite rooms was led by Michael McMillan. The terraced house front room is set in 1978 and is based on Michael's experience of growing up in the Windrush generation home in Hackney. The bright colours and buzzing television makes it feel like the family has really just left the room. Whilst incredibly sensitive to specific realities, Sonia explains that she hopes anyone who has lived in a home in the 1970s will recognise things here – “things are the same and different about every scenario that we show. We hope we’ve done them sensitively enough.”
Sensitive is certainly the word. The 2024 kitchen and living room of a British Vietnamese family (the fictionalised Nguyễn household) is particularly vivid, complete with live karaoke, and a well-loved kitchen belonging to a first-generation British Vietnamese home with a collage of sound recordings from a real home, which underscores the scene beautifully. One curator was excited to welcome her family and the local British Vietnamese community into the room: “to see themselves celebrated like this will be huge," she enthuses.
The museum will host a program of events co-curated with communities and all focused on practised of the home, from cooking workshops to talks, family archiving tutorials, film screenings and panel talks.
Museum of the Home, 136 Kingsland Road, London E2 8EA, museumofthehome.org.uk
