The Sewing Machine Museum

[several_bees]

Perhaps because I talk louder than either of them, Kevan and miss-newham continue to indulge me in my conviction that we should go to pretty much every museum in London, the nicher the better. This weekend it was the first Saturday of the month, and we all know what that means: the Sewing Machine Museum in Balham was open between 2pm and 5pm

Comments

[nikborton]

If you run out of strange museums in London, the Belgian Fry Museum in Bruges is quite good. It's not especially boring, though. Just... a weird thing to have a museum about, even when fries are one of your national specialities.

[nikborton]

The chocolate museum is enormously boring, though.

[several_bees]

Nik it is a CHOCOLATE MUSEUM. I don't understand.

[nikborton]

The history of chocolate is a surprisingly tedious thing. Even the kiddie signs - both museums have cartoons at knee-height explaining some facet of the current section simply, and again the fry museum is better - fail to make it interesting.

The free milk/dark/white chocolate buttons on entry were very nice, though.

[several_bees]

But, but... Mesoamerican empires! Hans Sloane! Scandalous rumours that chocolate was terribly bad for you! There's an eighteenth-century letter from a French noblewoman that says something like "gosh, the Countess of Wherever drank so much chocolate during her pregnancy that her child was born black!", which is charming.

Maybe I need to get a job as Consultant to the Chocolate Museum where I walk around pointing at the signs and saying "more about death here!" and "hey you know women started taking hot chocolate to church in a town in Spain and then it was banned, and they stopped coming to church, and also somebody POISONED THE PRIEST, allegedly? Talk about that".

[nikborton]

In which case, you'll probably still find it boring because you know everything it has to tell you.

Though there are pickled cocoa beans and lots of implements and so on to look at. And a short film that I sat through half of in French before deciding the English probably wouldn't improve matters.