The Aperiodical 

You're reading: Posts Tagged: prdayoff

London Day Trip Stop 4: Sir John Soane’s Museum

By Peter Rowlett. Posted March 12, 2012

Having enjoyed a quick dip into the British Museum I headed to Lincoln’s Inn Fields.



The Camden Council website describes Lincoln’s Inn Fields as “the largest square in London and the oldest in Camden”, noting that “there has been public open space here since at least the 12th century” and the space was once “popular for duellists” and known for a “minor speaker’s corner”.

I had come to Lincoln’s Inn Fields to visit Sir John Soane’s Museum (left of the photo above). The clue I tweeted to my location was the scaffolding on the outside of the museum. David Ault pointed out that this was a poor clue as it contained the name of the museum! I also tweeted the above photo of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which Speakers for Schools guessed correctly.

Sir John Soane’s Museum is so named because Sir John Soane built it:

as a setting for his antiquities and his works of art. After the death of his wife (1815), he lived here alone, constantly adding to and rearranging his collections. Having been deeply disappointed by the conduct of his two sons, one of whom survived him, he determined to establish the house as a museum to which ‘amateurs and students’ should have access.

The Soane Museum had been placed on the suggestions map as a:

House packed with loads of ancient stuff and architectural bits and so on. Free to get in between 10 and 5, but there’s usually a bit of a queue.

The queue was minimal and I was able to enter the house. I had downloaded the audio tour, prepared to spend the recommended hour exploring the house, but I had arrived too late to begin this. What I saw from a quick dash (no photos, I’m afraid) was interesting and I definitely intend to go back when I had more time, but I had less than half an hour until I had to dash onwards to my first timed appointment of the day. I’ll save that for a later post.

London Day Trip Stop 3: British Museum

By Peter Rowlett. Posted March 5, 2012

Thinking I was being too obvious, particularly having just told Twitter I was in Russell Square, I tweeted a photo of the base of a pillar as a clue to my next location.



I hadn’t intended this to be a stop on my trip as I’ve been before but, having had lunch by the fountain in Russell Square Gardens, I couldn’t resist a few minutes inside the British Museum.



I made my way to the Enlightenment Gallery. I enjoy this room, which usually seems calm (relative to the bustling Egyptian galleries opposite) and is full of interesting small pieces including scientific instruments. I hadn’t realised but I had just missed the “eye–opener gallery tour” (Free; Daily, 12.30; for 30–40 minutes).

Having seen the King’s Library in the British Library earlier that morning, I was interested to read that this room was the previous location of the same library. Apparently its donation caused a building programme to expand the British Museum and this room was built in 1827 specifically to house the new library.

After the King’s Library was moved to the British Library in 1997, a restoration of the gallery in 2000-3 “revived the original room to its previous glory of the 1820s”:

Repairs to the oak and mahogany floor and classical architectural features have refreshed the space. Hundreds of square metres of plaster were cleaned to restore the yellow and gold ornamentation and the re-gilded balcony.
Two hundred kilometres of wiring (twice round the M25 motorway) enabled a subtle lighting system to be installed, which aims to complement the newly-restored colour scheme.
The result was that two centuries of use and London grime were washed away and a major permanent exhibition, using thousands of objects from the Museum collection to show how people understood their world in the Age of Enlightenment, was created.





To my surprise, no one had yet guessed my location! I tweeted a second clue, a row of postcards of the Rosetta Stone on sale in the museum shop, and Courtney Williams was quick to guess my location. Showing considerable wisdom, she tweeted:

I’d ask if I won a prize, but it was enough of a prize to take part

I said that was fortunate!

On my way out of the museum I popped my head around the corner to the Rosetta Stone.



The story of this stone is fairly famous and often, in my experience, mentioned in talks on cryptography.

After the stone was rediscovered in 1799 by Napoleon’s soldiers near the town of el-Rashid (Rosetta). The stone passed to British hands in the Treaty of Alexandria (1801), being exhibited in the British Museum since 1802 (apart from briefly moving to a safe location during wartime). The Enlightenment Gallery houses a replica of the stone positioned as originally displayed.

The stone carries a decree, crucially:

inscribed on the stone three times, in hieroglyphic (suitable for a priestly decree), demotic (the native script used for daily purposes), and Greek (the language of the administration).

The repetition of the same text in three languages was important to modern understanding of hieroglyphs, and through them our understanding of ancient Egyptian culture.

Thomas Young, an English physicist, was the first to show that some of the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone wrote the sounds of a royal name, that of Ptolemy. The French scholar Jean-François Champollion then realized that hieroglyphs recorded the sound of the Egyptian language.

After my short but enjoyable visit to the museum, I moved on to my next location, which I will save for a later post.

London Day Trip Stop 2: Russell Square

By Peter Rowlett. Posted March 2, 2012

Having visited the British Library on stop 1, I bought a sandwich for lunch and walked down to Russell Square.

The clue I tweeted to my location (below) was nicely ambiguous, looking like a fairly standard London scene. David Ault, winner of the photo clue competition at stop 1, attempted a “CSI ‘Zoom… Enhance…’” on the phone boxes but failed.



A page on the Camden Council website gives a timeline of history of the Russell Square. The origins are in 1545 when the first Earl of Southampton purchased the manor of Bloomsbury from the Crown, and particularly in 1669 when the Russell family acquired the Estate. A period of building in the late 18th and early 19th centuries led to the laying out of a garden in Russell Square in 1806.

Russell square is described in ‘Russell Square and Bedford Square‘ (Old and New London: Volume 4 by Edward Walford) in 1878:

A writer in the St. James’s Magazine thus speaks of this locality: “Russell Square is, under ordinary circumstances, a very nice place to walk in. If those troublesome railway vans and goods wagons would not come lumbering and clattering, by way of Southampton Row, through the square, and up Guilford Street, on their way to King’s Cross, ‘La Place Roussell’ would be as cosy and tranquil as ‘La Place Royale’ in Paris. It has the vastness of Lincoln’s Inn Fields without its dinginess.”

It was in these gardens that I sat for my lunch, by a fountain that was added in a re-landscaping in 2000-1, “loosely based” on the original layout. I visit Russell Square often, though not often the gardens, as it is the location of De Morgan House, headquarters of the London Mathematical Society (LMS). The photo below shows a view from the fountain towards De Morgan House.



According to a brief history given on the LMS website, the formation of the society took place in a fashion of founding new “specialised scientific outlets” in the 19th century, including societies for geology (1807), astronomy (1820), statistics (1834) and chemistry (1841). Originally associated with University College London (incidentally, on the other side of Russell Square), the LMS held its first meeting at University College on Monday January 16th 1865 with Augustus De Morgan, the founding professor of mathematics at University College, as its first President giving the opening address.  The idea for the society came from De Morgan’s son, George Campbell De Morgan, and Arthur Cowper Ranyard, both former students at University College, who felt “it would be very nice to have a Society to which all discoveries in Mathematics could be brought, and where things could be discussed, like the Astronomical [Society]”.

Having operated from offices in various locations, the Society located in (and renamed) De Morgan House in 1998. The building now holds a conference venue and a room used by the IMA for meetings, one or other of which is where I tend to be going when I visit Russell Square on ordinary days.

The square is also the home of the Russell Hotel. This is a significant location because the hotel gives its name to the Russell Group of 20 universities which, according to its website, are “committed to maintaining the very best research, an outstanding teaching and learning experience and unrivalled links with business and the public sector”. The Russell Group was founded and originally met in the hotel.

Having finished my lunch, I moved on. I will save my next stop for another post.

London Day Trip Stop 1: British Library

By Peter Rowlett. Posted February 29, 2012

In a previous blog post Things to do in London on a Tuesday I asked for suggestions of things to do on my day trip to London. I went because I was invited to attend the inaugural London walking tour from Maths in the City – we’ll get to that – and apparently the date was chosen on purpose as it was a palindrome: 21-02-2012.

On arrival in London, I idly tweeted a photo along the station platform with the caption “Looks like London”. James Clare responded to this with a guess at which station.

I was at St. Pancras. What everyone seems to notice about St. Pancras is the roof, seen in the picture below which I took on the day. This was apparently first opened in 1868 and the 243ft roof created “the largest indoor space in the world“. More recently, an £800m restoration project was completed in 2008. You can watch an interesting BBC short video about this project, featuring interviews with the chief architect, the project director and the project engineer.



Following James’ tweet, I liked the idea of a guessing game so I tweeted a clue for my new location. David Ault guessed correctly that I was at the British Library.



Outside the British Library is a statue of Newton (1995), which had been suggested to me as a destination on my day trip. Designed by Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, who said it was “intended to show how art and science are interconnected”, the statue is inspired by a 1795/circa 1805 colour print finished in ink and watercolour on paper entitled “Isaac Newton” by William Blake, which can be found in the Tate gallery.



Inside the library, I found the King’s library. Created by George III, donated to the nation in 1823 by his son George IV and once housed in the British Museum, these books are housed in an eye-catching six-storey tower (pictured below). A description of how the library was formed and its history is available on the British Library page George III Collection: the King’s Library.



I also visited the Treasures of the British Library gallery, described on the website as “a permanent free display of many of our greatest treasures”. No photographs were allowed but I took a few notes.

I saw a collection of photos and documents from the Scott polar expedition. Fresh from my Twitter photo clue competition, a note caught my eye about the use of photography to increase public interest in Scott’s expedition. The Guardian has a piece about an exhibition of photos from the expedition, which says:

In 1910 and 1911, as Scott struggled to raise funds and public support for the Terra Nova venture – media hysteria about the race to the pole was the reason the South Pole was bolted onto the scientific expedition – the explorer knew the propaganda value of superb images

Herbert Ponting (1870-1935) was hired as expedition photographer. A selection of Ponting’s photos have been uploaded to a gallery by the National Archive and one is available below.



I also saw two pages of notes by Leonardo Da Vinci from Codex Arundel. Leonardo began the collection in 1508, writing that this was “a collection without order, drawn from many papers”. The writing is mirrored Italian written from left to write. According to the British Library website pages were added from different periods in Leonardo’s life, “covering practically the whole of his career”. The website has this to say of the contents:

It includes notes for a book on the physical properties and geographical effects of water, and a broad range of other material encompassing Leonardo’s other interests in art, science and technology over a period of four decades, from the description of a prehistoric sea monster (c. 1478-80) to architectural projects for the royal residence at Romarantin in France (dating to about 1517/1518). The range of subjects – from mechanics to the flight of birds – demonstrates Leonardo’s almost compulsive intellectual curiousity about scientific and technical matters.

The pages I saw in the library were on mechanics and arithmetic. There are pages on the British Library website that show some pages from the Codex Arundel, and an introduction to the Codex.

I also saw an exhibition on early printing, many sacred texts and Magna Carta before moving onto my next stop. That, I’ll save for another post.