May's Monthly Newsletter

Temples to Mammon seen from the approach to London City Airport, with St Paul’s lurking between the engine and the wing in the photo. The Square Mile sits atop Roman Londinium

Last week I made a flying visit to see family in London, and while there I visited the Roman Army exhibition at the British Museum. I also paid a visit to the room originally built to house King George III’s Library and which is now called the Enlightenment Gallery. It is an intriguing and eclectic bit of museology. Among the fossils and astrolabes; ceramics and sculptures one of my favourite things on display in the wall cases is something I’ve been gently obsessed by since adolescence: the Tolley Marbles.

Being a teenager in the nineties was, I found, often quite boring and the summer holidays were somehow both interminable and never long enough. On one occasion, aged perhaps fifteen, I bemoaned the absence of entertainment for the umpteenth time. My mother, with not unreasonable exasperation, pointed out that we lived in Central London, a city (even before all national museums became free during the Blair government) full of free museums.

Self-portrait with (some of) the Tolley Marbles, including “cipollino” marble, the quarries of which I’ve explored in Greece, and which I wrote about here.

In my mind I then cheerfully trotted off to the British Museum. This is almost certainly not how it happened. I expect there was harrumphing, and a spiky atmosphere-creating teenage tantrum or two (sorry Mum). But go I eventually did, and under my own steam. And then, over listless summers, I went again and again in that strange part of life where one is really just waiting—in a hormonal tangle of spots and awkwardness—for it all to begin. I went to the British Museum and the Tate and the National Gallery, and looked at the world from a perspective both larger and infinitely more interesting than the tiresome concerns of a solipsistic teenager, a liberating escape from oneself. Because I was on my own I could spend as long (or not) as I wanted. Often in those pre-security queue days I would walk in, look at two things, and leave, walking home through the squares of Bloomsbury plugged into my Walkman and feeling awfully sophisticated.

Augustus of Meroë. From Sudan to Bloomsbury.

At some point during these visits to the British Museum—when cars were still parked in the forecourt and the glass-covered Great Court was yet to replace the grubby area around the Reading Room—the Tolley Marbles caught my attention and have stuck in my mind ever since. They are a battery of wooden framed examples of stones used in Greek and Roman art and architectural decoration which were collected during his travels by a certain Henry Tolley in the mid-nineteenth century, and donated to the Museum in 1903 by his daughter.

St Martin-in-the-Fields seen from the entrance to the National Gallery last week. My five times great-grandfather was married in this church, more of which in this (free) post from last year.

In retrospect it was during these visits that I first had an inkling of my enthusiasm for the geological map of Empire which would decorate Imperial Rome, and subsequently be repurposed in the service of the decorations of the phoenix of the Church which would rise, triumphant, from the ashes of that Empire.

Thirty years later I still find a museum the correct antidote to a funk: amid all those millennia of human endeavour the extraordinary fortune of being right here, right now, feels pretty amazing, even when sometimes it doesn’t.