2005

  • Come and be Enlightened. 10 March 2005, UK. SHNH Evening visit, with a Gallery talk by Brendan Moore and Kim Sloan on  “The Age of Enlightenment display ” in the Kings’ Library, followed by drinks in the adjacent Panizzi room.
  • Blythe House Museum Store tour. 11 February 2005, UK.  Blythe House in West Kensington, London, formerly the headquarters of the Post Office National Savings Bank, is now a Museum store for both the Science Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museums.

Crystal Palace Park, Penge, and Horniman Museum and Library, UK

Saturday 19 November 2005

Meeting Secretary's Report

SHNH members visted Crystal Palace Park, Penge, to see the exhibition of Dinosaurs, have lunch and view historic book auction catalogues, and then continue to the Horniman Museum and Library, Forest Hill, UK

Over 150 years ago when Sir Joseph Paxton constructed Crystal Palace Park, he collaborated with a team of eminent and visionary men to incorporate within its layout the world’s first ‘Dinosaur Park’. This display and landscape area depict a journey through prehistoric time, with life-size dinosaur statues together with other prehistoric reptiles and mammals, and examples of geology, spanning 350 million years of Britain’s evolution.  The dinosaurs  were built at the lower end of the Park, near Penge, and remain there to this day, together with accompanying geological exhibits. A £4 million restoration programme has returned this prehistoric tableau of dinosaur models and landscape to its former glory involving work by palaeontologists, landscape architects and palaeobotanists. Repairs or replacement of the models and geological exhibits match those originally used. Two new Pterodactyls and a Limestone Cliff have been reconstructed, according to historic records.

John Collins of Maggs Brothers kindly offered his house as a venue for lunch, and provided members with a display of historic book auction  catalogues.

The Horniman Museum was founded by the Victorian tea trader, Frederick Horniman, in 1901. His ethnographic and natural history collections also include a superb display of musical instruments and a new temporary exhibition “Amazon to Caribbean, early peoples of the rainforest” . The Library complements these collections and has just moved into the  grass-roofed CUE building. David W. Allen showed us the Library and the Museum.

Hunterian Museum, Sir John Soane Museum & the Grant Museum of Zoology

Spring Meeting & AGM in London, 2005

Meetings Secretary's Report

In February 2005, the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons re-opened to the public after a two-year closure for refurbishment. At the heart of the museum lies an extraordinary collection of over 3,500 anatomical and pathological preparations, specimens of natural history, fossils, paintings and drawings assembled by the Scottish-born surgeon and anatomist John Hunter (1728-93).

Simon Chaplin, Senior Curator of the Museums of The Royal College of England, welcomed participants and gave a fascinating presentation on the history of the Hunterian collections as well as an introduction to the newly refurbished displays, focused on the stunning “crystal room” at the heart of the collection.

The AGM dealt with the necessary business of the Society, culminating in the awarding of the 2005 John Thackray Medal to Dr David Allen and Gabrielle Hatfield for their book, Medicinal plants in folk tradition: an ethnobotany of Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Timber Press, 2005).

Thanks to Stephen Massil and his colleagues, members and guests then had an opportunity to visit a display of natural history books in the library of Sir John Soane on the opposite side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields at the Sir John Soane Museum.


After lunch, all made their way to the Grant Museum of Zoology at University College, London where Helen Chatterjee, the Curator, introduced the collection and encouraged us to explore its variety.The Grant Museum is the only remaining university zoological museum in London. It houses around 62,000 specimens, covering the whole Animal Kingdom. Founded in 1827 as a teaching collection, the Museum is packed full of skeletons, mounted animals and specimens preserved in fluid. Many of the species are now endangered or extinct including the Tasmanian Tiger or Thylacine, the Quagga, and the Dodo.

After tea the participants gathered in the lecture theatre to hear Dr Kees Rookmaaker on “Explorers, collectors and artists, the pleasures of investigating the history of Natural History”. Dr Rookmaaker had been presented with the 2005 SHNH's Founders' Medal at the AGM earlier in the day.

Those who were able to stay on attended a most convivial conference dinner at Zamzama restaurant in nearby Drummond Street.

Gina Douglas, Meetings Secretary

 
 
The Society for the History of Natural History (Registered Charity No.2103555 in England and Wales)