In 1941 the upper floors of the British Museum were hit by incendiary bombs. More than 60 years on Robert Smirke's original design has been restored. In the spring a central space will house a new exhibition about time, with objects drawn from all parts of the museum.
To one side of this new space is the money gallery, (after all, we are told time is money), to the other the newly opened clocks and watches gallery. Rooms 38 and 39 are a joy.
They are light and airy, with high ceilings. For the first time the full height and depth of pendulums can be displayed. More than a thousand clocks and over 4,500 watches from the vast collections in Bloomsbury trace the aesthetic, technological and social history
of timepieces.
We cannot pinpoint with any accuracy when mechanical clocks, preceded for centuries by sundials and water clocks, first appeared. Historians suggest a date towards the end of the 13th century.
There is an intriguing record in 1286 of the clockmaker of St Paul's Cathedral being awarded 23 bowls of beer though no indication of the subsequent accuracy of the horologist or his clocks.
Early mechanical clocks were rarely able to keep time to anything better than half-an-hour a day. Modern watches now boast an accuracy of within one second in 30 million years.
This exhibition makes clear the public nature of early clocks; they were expensive and so were mainly seen in churches and cathedrals. They instilled discipline and proclaimed the wealth of the institution. Interior clocks were equally items of status, conspicuous statements of wealth and privilege.
There are splendidly ostentatious examples in the exhibition, notably the 1648 Krakow tabernacle clock by Lucas Weydman, with its finely engraved biblical scenes, townscapes and engraved glass panels. Separate dials show hours, minutes, the phases of the moon and astrological relationships.
Excellence in craftsmanship was not confined to continental Europe. I was much taken with the 1585 gilt-copper table clock made by Elizabeth I's clockmaker, Bartholomew Newsam, which is breathtakingly beautiful in its simplicity.
Far more opulent is the Year-Going table clock made by the most celebrated of English clockmakers, Thomas Tompion, in the coronation year of William and Mary and kept in the Royal bedchamber. The ebony-veneered oak case is lavishly decorated with silver and gilt mounts and topped by a defiant figure of a unified Britannia.
The pendulum created new standards of accuracy. Time measurement rather than luxury gained kudos. It was observed that the pendulum of a clock gets longer when heated and shorter when cooled.
George Graham, a fellow of the Royal Society, devised a solution by which the brass pendulum rod carried a jar of mercury, which expanded and contracted in the opposite direction. His Longcase Precision Regulator of 1745 is both functional and felicitous.
The exhibition takes pains to stress the importance of developments in marine chronometry by British craftsmen. There are fine examples of Thomas Mudge's Timekeeper No 1, John Arnold's instrument that was used aboard James Cook's Resolution and the subsequent voyages of Discovery and Chatham, and Thomas Earnshaw's chronometers supplied to the Royal Navy.
Space is found for the commercial development of machine-made clocks that democratised ownership. The ubiquitous cuckoo clock finds a place, as do examples of the cheap American clocks by Jerome that flooded the markets of Europe to the detriment of British clockmaking.
And so to watches. For me, and for many others, the watch is more than a portable machine made to measure and mark the passage of time. It can be a flourished status symbol, an elegant possession - think of the cachet of a Rolex, real or fake.
But a watch, unlike a mobile phone, has lasting emotional significance when received as a gift, a token of affection or legacy. It is part of oneself, an intimate companion. A timepiece too has a face and hands.
As a Cockney, I note that when watches first became widely available in the 19th century, dial became the vernacular lingo for a face. One of my great uncles was proud to be called a clocky, a watchman on London docks.
As a teenager I took, probably out of affectation, to wearing a pocket watch. I still do. It would feel strange not to feel daily the comforting weight of one ticker adjacent to another.
The gallery makes clear that during the 16th-century craftsmen were centred in the German cities of Nuremberg, Augsburg and Munich. Subsequent developments spread the trade to France, Flanders and the Netherlands. It was religion that brought watchmaking to England. The Spanish occupation of the Netherlands in 1568 caused an exodus of craftsmen to London.
Similarly, Protestant Huguenot watchmakers and silversmiths established themselves in the area around Blackfriars after the St Bartholomew's Day massacre in France in 1572. Craftsmen moved too from Catholic Paris to Calvinist Geneva.
The exhibition is strong on early examples of flamboyantly decorated watches. They were designed to be worn around the neck or hung from a belt and were ornately beautiful, like David Bouguet's gold and enamel floral watch of 1650 or John Bushman's Verge watch of 1700, with its curious half dials.
A revolution occurred with the creation of pockets in clothing. We see then the onset of so-called Puritan watches with plain dials. The first watch to be acquired by the British Museum was reputedly owned by that arch-Puritan Oliver Cromwell.
A "small plain oval gold watch… going upon catgut", it has some provenance, having been given perhaps to one of Cromwell's colonels by the man himself.
There are a multitude of wristwatches dating from those developed in the early 21st century, via the luxuries of Rolex, Longine, LeCoultre and others to the mass productions of Ingersoll and Swatch.
I am not technologically minded. I had expected to be gently diverted by a short visit to the clocks and watches gallery, but became enthralled for hours. Like the protagonists in Waiting for Godot, "the time would have passed in any case… but not as rapidly".
The labelling is a model of a careful balance of scholarship and clear English; and the whole exhibition a blend of elegance and eloquence. I recommend that any visitor to the British Museum seeks out this gallery. It will be time well spent.
Peter Lewis is a writer and a past director of Beamish
To one side of this new space is the money gallery, (after all, we are told time is money), to the other the newly opened clocks and watches gallery. Rooms 38 and 39 are a joy.
They are light and airy, with high ceilings. For the first time the full height and depth of pendulums can be displayed. More than a thousand clocks and over 4,500 watches from the vast collections in Bloomsbury trace the aesthetic, technological and social history
of timepieces.
We cannot pinpoint with any accuracy when mechanical clocks, preceded for centuries by sundials and water clocks, first appeared. Historians suggest a date towards the end of the 13th century.
There is an intriguing record in 1286 of the clockmaker of St Paul's Cathedral being awarded 23 bowls of beer though no indication of the subsequent accuracy of the horologist or his clocks.
Early mechanical clocks were rarely able to keep time to anything better than half-an-hour a day. Modern watches now boast an accuracy of within one second in 30 million years.
This exhibition makes clear the public nature of early clocks; they were expensive and so were mainly seen in churches and cathedrals. They instilled discipline and proclaimed the wealth of the institution. Interior clocks were equally items of status, conspicuous statements of wealth and privilege.
There are splendidly ostentatious examples in the exhibition, notably the 1648 Krakow tabernacle clock by Lucas Weydman, with its finely engraved biblical scenes, townscapes and engraved glass panels. Separate dials show hours, minutes, the phases of the moon and astrological relationships.
Excellence in craftsmanship was not confined to continental Europe. I was much taken with the 1585 gilt-copper table clock made by Elizabeth I's clockmaker, Bartholomew Newsam, which is breathtakingly beautiful in its simplicity.
Far more opulent is the Year-Going table clock made by the most celebrated of English clockmakers, Thomas Tompion, in the coronation year of William and Mary and kept in the Royal bedchamber. The ebony-veneered oak case is lavishly decorated with silver and gilt mounts and topped by a defiant figure of a unified Britannia.
The pendulum created new standards of accuracy. Time measurement rather than luxury gained kudos. It was observed that the pendulum of a clock gets longer when heated and shorter when cooled.
George Graham, a fellow of the Royal Society, devised a solution by which the brass pendulum rod carried a jar of mercury, which expanded and contracted in the opposite direction. His Longcase Precision Regulator of 1745 is both functional and felicitous.
The exhibition takes pains to stress the importance of developments in marine chronometry by British craftsmen. There are fine examples of Thomas Mudge's Timekeeper No 1, John Arnold's instrument that was used aboard James Cook's Resolution and the subsequent voyages of Discovery and Chatham, and Thomas Earnshaw's chronometers supplied to the Royal Navy.
Space is found for the commercial development of machine-made clocks that democratised ownership. The ubiquitous cuckoo clock finds a place, as do examples of the cheap American clocks by Jerome that flooded the markets of Europe to the detriment of British clockmaking.
And so to watches. For me, and for many others, the watch is more than a portable machine made to measure and mark the passage of time. It can be a flourished status symbol, an elegant possession - think of the cachet of a Rolex, real or fake.
But a watch, unlike a mobile phone, has lasting emotional significance when received as a gift, a token of affection or legacy. It is part of oneself, an intimate companion. A timepiece too has a face and hands.
As a Cockney, I note that when watches first became widely available in the 19th century, dial became the vernacular lingo for a face. One of my great uncles was proud to be called a clocky, a watchman on London docks.
As a teenager I took, probably out of affectation, to wearing a pocket watch. I still do. It would feel strange not to feel daily the comforting weight of one ticker adjacent to another.
The gallery makes clear that during the 16th-century craftsmen were centred in the German cities of Nuremberg, Augsburg and Munich. Subsequent developments spread the trade to France, Flanders and the Netherlands. It was religion that brought watchmaking to England. The Spanish occupation of the Netherlands in 1568 caused an exodus of craftsmen to London.
Similarly, Protestant Huguenot watchmakers and silversmiths established themselves in the area around Blackfriars after the St Bartholomew's Day massacre in France in 1572. Craftsmen moved too from Catholic Paris to Calvinist Geneva.
The exhibition is strong on early examples of flamboyantly decorated watches. They were designed to be worn around the neck or hung from a belt and were ornately beautiful, like David Bouguet's gold and enamel floral watch of 1650 or John Bushman's Verge watch of 1700, with its curious half dials.
A revolution occurred with the creation of pockets in clothing. We see then the onset of so-called Puritan watches with plain dials. The first watch to be acquired by the British Museum was reputedly owned by that arch-Puritan Oliver Cromwell.
A "small plain oval gold watch… going upon catgut", it has some provenance, having been given perhaps to one of Cromwell's colonels by the man himself.
There are a multitude of wristwatches dating from those developed in the early 21st century, via the luxuries of Rolex, Longine, LeCoultre and others to the mass productions of Ingersoll and Swatch.
I am not technologically minded. I had expected to be gently diverted by a short visit to the clocks and watches gallery, but became enthralled for hours. Like the protagonists in Waiting for Godot, "the time would have passed in any case… but not as rapidly".
The labelling is a model of a careful balance of scholarship and clear English; and the whole exhibition a blend of elegance and eloquence. I recommend that any visitor to the British Museum seeks out this gallery. It will be time well spent.
Peter Lewis is a writer and a past director of Beamish
Project data
Cost: undisclosed
Main funders: Sir Harry and Lady Djanogly
Exhibition design: Softroom and Jade Design
Lighting: DHA lighting
Display cases: Goppion
Cost: undisclosed
Main funders: Sir Harry and Lady Djanogly
Exhibition design: Softroom and Jade Design
Lighting: DHA lighting
Display cases: Goppion
