Eat but don’t Touch: The Museum Cafe
“An ace caff with quite a nice museum attached”
Exhibitions are thirsty work. There comes a point for all visitors where they simply cannot comprehend another artwork, statue, ruin, historic house or informational pamphlet until they have had a coffee, a sit down, and preferably also a cake. But these days museums won’t just provide captive visitors with a pot of breakfast tea and a slightly claggy scone, oh no. Cultural punters can now expect three course meals, michelin star outposts and themed food and cocktails alongside the exhibition du jour. No need to exit through the gift shop anymore, you’ve already spent your life savings on Picasso pasta. A day out at one of our great cultural institutions is not truly complete without a trip to the caff, but when and why did this charming tradition begin?
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London
In 1988 the Victoria and Albert museum in London ran a series of ads under the tagline: ‘An ace caff with quite a nice museum attached’. Various objects were photographed with slogans such as: ‘Where else do they give you £100,000,000 worth of objets d'art free with every egg salad?’. Though the mention of egg salad planted the advert as a product of the 80’s more than anything before seen, and the widespread backlash the adverts produced as the irreverent tone of the marketing made serious scholars choke, presumably on their egg salad; the ‘ace caff’ punchline has been canonised in the annals of advertising history.
In fairness the advert producers Saatchi & Saatchi had done their research. The copy may have been wry but it was entirely historically accurate.
Let’s rewind the clock. Specifically to 1851. The ‘Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations’ in the purpose-built Crystal Palace in Hyde Park had gone down like gangbusters. Diamonds, guns that were also umbrellas, stuffed elephants and the recent invention of photography drew visitors en masse and above it all the world’s largest greenhouse, the Crystal Place itself, glittered in the summer sun. This showcase of the globe’s greatest treasures, manufacturing achievements and cultural artefacts to over six million visitors had also showcased Britain’s curatorial prowess. With the profits from the exhibition, roughly £186,000 (approximately £20 million today), a large plot of land in South Kensington (then known as Brompton) in West London was acquired.
Two of the key figures in this were Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria and staunch patron of the arts, and Henry Cole, assistant keeper at the Public Records Office, a council member of the Society of Arts and a journalist and writer. It was Cole who had first proposed a large exhibition of this kind. Their plan was to reinvest in activities associated with the Great Exhibition and transform the plot into a haven of culture. Using a Treasury grant of £5,000 they purchased a selection of objects which formed the nucleus for the first institution: the Museum of Manufactures, opened near Pall Mall in 1852. Its director was Henry Cole. Makes sense.
Meanwhile development began in Brompton. At the time the area was hardly central; it was still primarily a rural village that had yet to be eclipsed by the oncoming tsunami of urban sprawl and visitors to the area would have to actively travel out of central London (Shock. Horror.) to get there. Despite this hugely massive inconvenience, Albert and Cole were unmoved and it turns out they were right to be.
Today the plot of land, which was nicknamed Albertopolis after its primary benefactor, is a cultural powerhouse, subsumed by Central London. Within spitting distance you can find Imperial College London, the Natural History Museum, the Royal Albert Hall, the Royal Colleges of Art and of Music, the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Institute of Navigation, the Science Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, renamed from South Kensington Museum in 1899.
South End of the Iron Museum (the 'Brompton Boilers'), South Kensington, A. Lanchenick, about 1860.
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London
If the Museum of Manufactures doesn’t sound familiar, it shouldn’t. The museum was moved to a new building in South Kensington and rebranded to the more geographically appropriate South Kensington Museum in 1856. Here, for visitors who made the trek, collections of applied art and science could be enjoyed well into the evening thanks to the employment of some new-fangled gas lighting, a world first for a museum. However it was something else that opened alongside the museum that would rock the arts and culture sector to its very core.
You see Henry Cole had a vision. In the heart of Albertopolis he would create something so unusual, so unique and special that it would make the British Museum (est. 1753) sob with despair! It would be the envy of museums across the country and the world! It would serve jugged hare, steak pudding and seasonal tarts!
The world’s first museum cafe opened in the South Kensington Museum in 1856 in a temporary dining pavilion in the courtyard.
Henry Cole hoped the Museum would 'furnish a powerful antidote to the gin palace’, referring to the ornate pubs that much of the lower classes spent much of their free time frequenting. Though they were hugely popular, they were considered vulgar by the upper classes, who would have preferred that the masses spent their limited free time expanding their mind through education and other worthy pursuits rather than ingesting large quantities of the 'opium of the people'. As such one prong of attack against the scourge of day drinking was the museum, and Cole rather cannily realised that offering a hot meal is one sure way of encouraging people to come and enjoy culture.
How so?
In 1842 Sir Richard Owen coined the term ‘Dinosaur’, meaning ‘terrible lizard’, even though dinosaurs are quite famously not lizards and we don’t know them well enough as people to pass judgement on whether or not they were terrible. Owen himself however was terrible; known for being a malicious, dishonest and hateful individual, holding grudges and making it his personal mission to bury rivals in the annals of history. It is perhaps surprising therefore that we can reasonably credit Owen for making the museum into what we know it as today.
Before Owen’s tenure as superintendent of the Natural History departments of the British Museum in 1856 and its subsequent separation into the building we now know as the Natural History Museum in London, directly next to the V&A, attending a museum was no easy task. Though the museum was technically public and open to ‘studious and curious persons’ since 1759, visitors would have to apply for a ticket, be interviewed to check their worthiness (and cleanliness), visit again to collect their tickets and come back yet again to use the tickets to see the collections. The prevailing opinion at the time was that the elites who were judged well-dressed enough to visit the museum would bring the knowledge and understanding they found there back to ‘...the ploughboys of Hampshire and of Surrey, and to the weavers of Lancashire’, in the words of 19th century politician William Cobbett (sarcastically), via some vague miasma trickle-down economics model for dispelling culture to the poor. Public museums were in no way universal.
As first director of the hottest new museum in town, Owen made the radical decision in 1881 to allow access to any and all who wanted to view the collections, wishing to share the latest specimens and theories with the public. This was rather progressive for a man who devoted much of his time to writing anonymous scathing reviews of his rival's work. Nevertheless, the result was a public museum that was for the first time truly public. It is thanks to Owen that museums are now considered public institutions and places of education and learning so that men like Henry Cole could even consider them as a worthy opponent to the draws of the gin palace in the mid-19th century.
Other factors were at work however. Cole had learnt a lot about visitor needs while managing the Great Exhibition years earlier. For example, among the Great Exhibition’s wonderland of inventions was another world’s first: the flushing public toilet, installed by George Jennings. It is also the origin of the phrase ‘spend a penny’ as visitors spent one penny to experience a clean toilet seat, a towel, a comb and a shoe shine. Records show that 675,000 pennies were spent. People were very excited. The British museum didn’t install any public toilets at all until the latter half of the 1800’s, the trustees considering the matter objectionable and indelicate. South Kensington employed them from the start. It’s not looking good for the British Museum right now. Cafes for visitors were themselves not entirely new. Country houses such as Rokeby Park in Yorkshire and Stowe in Oxfordshire had been running small tea rooms for those who toured the properties for decades, but this was the first time a public institution had deigned to provide such facilities. So Cole was the first to recognise that little things like toilets and tea and adequate lighting in the galleries could have a great positive impact on visitor satisfaction. Most other museums didn’t catch onto this until well into the 20th century.
The Grill Room by John Watkins, 1976 – 81.
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Partly the addition of such creature comforts in a space of learning is a matter of timing. Large scale public toilets could not have been installed before the means to build them had been conceived, nor was the museum’s draw of hot food to entice the lower class plausible if lower classes were not first allowed admission, but they were and here we are. A public institution, created with public needs in mind.
The temporary dining pavilion at the V&A that housed this first cafe was demolished in 1867, replaced by three refreshment rooms whose design reflect a range of contemporary design theory at Cole’s insistence. These original rooms are still in use today, and visitors may choose to eat either in the Renaissance Revival of the Gamble Room, the Eastern flair of the Poynter Room, or the Morris Room's rich, arts and crafts eclecticism. Dining is also no longer divided by class.
Ps - this doesn't mean I like the National Trust cafe food. Sort it out guys.