It’s barely two miles from Soho to the museums of Brompton - a hop easily made in a heartbeat by hansom cab, though in the 1860s, by horse-drawn carriage, this corner of London felt a league away, almost out of reach of the city’s daily quick step.
The Victorians, much like us today, were irresistibly drawn to art and science - but also, rather sensibly, to somewhere that served a good cup of tea. And so, I found myself wandering here with the family, to what is claimed to be the world’s first museum restaurant: a room designed to dazzle while one sips a comforting cup of Rosie Lee.
Among these pleasures was born the Centre Refreshment Room - a name so fabulously Victorian it could only belong to this place. Today it’s known as the Gamble Room, after the fella who led its design. And what a room it is. When ensconced with and sconce, there’s no real need to sit still; the walls and ceilings are enough to keep the mind busy for hours.
When the Victoria and Albert Museum first rose - brick by tile by marble - in the middle of the 19th century, this was still market-garden London, fields giving way to foundations as the city asserted itself onto surrounding arable land. Within twenty years of opening, the South Kensington Museum (its original name) was joined by an offshoot of the British Museum, appropriately named the Natural History Museum. The Science Museum soon followed, stepping into its own identity by the century’s end. To complete the vision came the Royal Albert Hall, and then, ten years later, another flourish of gothic red brick - the Royal College of Music.
Standing among this menagerie of grand buildings, I wonder how it all came to be. To answer that, I wind the clock back to the Great Exhibition of 1851. For many, it exists only as a footnote attached to the Crystal Palace (and a fair to middling football team) - a structure of such vast scale that it would have been impossible to construct a mere century earlier, made real only by giant leaps in plate-glass production.
And so this hive of learning stands today, rooted in an incomparable patch of earth; 87 acres devoted to art and science, where the wonders of our world quietly reside, as the traffic swirls and the hordes ebb and flow. From pre-solar grains - diamond dust older than the sun - to woven fabrics, gilded pages, Arctic furs, pollen, moon rock, musical instruments, emperors’ clothes, gemstones, and the bones of creatures long extinct. Each object waiting patiently, each with its own story to tell.
Still, every time I visit - to wander another floor, to discover something new - I always end up at the café. They’ve just started selling a Rooibos scone, so perhaps it really is true, wonders will never cease.
The Gamble Room. Victoria and Albert Museum, London