World Gallery, Horniman Museum and Gardens, London

The world’s a big place. Indeed, according to an app on my phone called Been, which tracks the countries I have visited, I’ve only covered 14% of it – and that’s after a serious degree of rounding-up.

So the prospect of exploring all the continents, their cultures and the civilisations that have emerged was a welcome opportunity to fill in the gaps. And all it took was a visit to south London’s Horniman Museum and Gardens.

The World Gallery, which opened at the end of June, displays more than 3,000 objects from its 80,000-strong collection, charting the history and diversity of civilisation and culture across the world. The £5m project took almost five years to complete and was supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

World Gallery is an ambitious title for what is a relatively small space – about 250 sq metres in total. The name also has potential pitfalls. How can the content and interpretation address concerns of post-colonialism, steer around accusations of cultural appropriation and weave in multiple voices to tell nuanced and subjective histories?

The simple task of selecting stories, objects and voices to include becomes a challenge in itself. I’m sure the list of what was not included would be enough to fill a library of encyclopaedias. And then there’s the question of who the exhibition should be for – the Horniman’s mainly family audience, London’s global diaspora, the cultures featured, the world?

Scratch below the surface and you begin to understand the scale of the task and countless headaches that awaited the Horniman as it set off on its journey to bring the world to south London.

The gallery is divided into four interlinked spaces. An introductory area welcomes visitors and explores the sentiments and memories associated with objects. Following this, a section titled Encounters consists of five rooms, each focusing on a specific continent, where visitors can find examples of ways of living from different times and places. Perspectives, a space at the back of the gallery, reflects on how and why we categorise, describe and understand the world.

And a section called Horniman’s Vision, which looks at the history of the venue and its founder John Frederick Horniman, is tucked away on the balcony above.

Diversity of cultures

All this structure is explained in the introduction to the gallery, where you are confronted by a large wall of objects, drawn from across the globe and time periods. Text and three prominent video screens explore the connections and memories people associate with these objects.

It’s clear that the Horniman put time and effort into consulting with local residents and the people connected to the objects on display. The screens play a series of films featuring people from community groups, volunteers, spiritual leaders, collectors and anthropologists talking about objects that mean something to them.

It’s interesting to see these accounts as they act as a springboard to imagine what the other objects on display may have meant to their creators or users. But the majority of items in the introductory section remain a mystery, with the looping of the three simultaneous videos pushing you onwards to explore the World Gallery.

While the introduction speaks of the broader emotions and universal concepts that underpin and tie cultures together, the heart of the gallery seems to shift towards a narrative focus and splits rooms by more traditional means: geographic continents.

To avoid generalisations, the interpretation is quick to highlight the diversity of cultures found across each continent, while making references to the underlying factors that have shaped and influenced them over time.

The content in each room explores three or four distinct cultures from each continent. On the surface, these displays feel conventional, with cases stocked full of clothing, crafts, artworks, instruments and curiosities. With the abundance of material, though, the interpretation seems cramped in a number of the displays, occasionally overlapping and obscuring each other.

The objects on display are fascinating, with detailed work undertaken to complement historic collections with the voices of people from these cultures. The introduction of new acquisitions hints at how these cultures continue to engage with the world around them, from the Tuareg (nomadic people of the Sahara) clothing incorporating designer sunglasses to graphic novels telling traditional Thai folklore stories.

But the highlight is a music video by the Tibetan rapper Shapaley, which instantly provokes you to rethink your concept of what “traditional” culture is and how it can be represented.

There is a plethora of ideas worked into the displays, which is commendable given the limited space. Artworks help tell the story of how traditions and knowledge of cultures can become a source of inspiration to others – such as the New Zealand artist Chris Charteris’s eco- warrior’s helmet, covered in spiked seashells, which was created as an emblem of the resourcefulness of the Kiribati nation, whose archipelago homes are threatened by climate change and rising sea levels.

The prow of Boat 195, a recently acquired piece of a ship that brought migrants to Europe, provides an emotive and striking way to begin the European section of the gallery. The object tells the story of people who have made the treacherous Mediterranean crossing in recent years, bringing to the surface questions about how difficult cultures are treated and perceived, and how the role the UK and Europe has played, and continues to play, is affecting many of the cultures.

Starting point

There are a few ideas that are less successful in the gallery. The Oceania displays have the same high-quality interpretation as the other continents, but are overwhelmed by an interactive floor projection of sealife, which acts as a magnet for family groups. The chasing of fish and gleeful stomping of projected coral does not add much, except perhaps an unintended metaphor for our impact of Oceania’s natural wonders.

But elsewhere, the content for families and children works well. Labels written by a group of English for Speakers of Other Languages learners and their families pose questions in every continent to help families reflect on the displays and their roots and traditions.

Child-relevant objects are displayed lower down, with interactives including smell stations and two visitor- participation stations. A large sculptural tree that invites people to leave their comments on it works as a fulcrum of visitor input while visually linking different sections and the displays on the ceiling.

Towards the end of the gallery, the Perspectives section feels dense. The sheer amount of objects on display leaves little room to fully explore shared or differing perspectives on the categories that the items are grouped in. Or, for that matter, to challenge whether classification can be beneficial or detrimental to the subjects being displayed.

But overall, the museum has put a lot of thought, time and research into the displays and the wider questions about what a world gallery should contain, how it should represent cultures and who it should be for.

That said, there are some missed opportunities in the gallery. Layered content is thin on the ground, leaving many objects, themes and contemporary issues just touched on and not fully explored.

The geographic arrangement of the content makes it difficult to explore the uniting themes and shared histories that cultures may have. In today’s interconnected yet polarised world, revealing, understanding and questioning these connections could have added greater relevance to the museum’s historic collections.

But given the comparatively small space, it’s a big achievement for the Horniman and all those involved. It is not an easy task to present such diversity and quantity of collections, and use them as a starting point to discuss issues around modernisation, artistic interpretation, multiple voices and visitor participation, while aiming for as wide an audience as possible.

Fitting the entire world into a small gallery was always going to mean sacrificing some things, but the objects and their stories and interpretation will no doubt act as a springboard for curious minds to delve deeper into the world around them.

Alex Fairhead is a senior consultant at the cultural consultancy Barker Langham


The Horniman Museum and Gardens’ World Gallery celebrates creativity, adaptability and resourcefulness. The guiding principle for its development has been to show that whatever exists is possible. Thinking about how other cultures do things, live together and give value provides the examples that begin to make the familiar strange, evoking perhaps what the anthropologist Tim Ingold has described as a sideways glance – a growing awareness that things could be done differently.

The Introduction space sets the emotional tone – a place that allows visitors to reflect on the ways that objects connect people. The most powerful emotions associated with objects involve love, grief and nostalgia, evoked by people talking about things that have a special meaning for them.

In the Encounters area, equal space is given to Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and Oceania. The case studies draw from the strengths of the Horniman collections, but also present contemporary narratives and material. We wanted to emphasise that the people we are representing share our world. We have to avoid creating the impression that diversity belongs in a pre-globalised past. This offers possibilities for imagining change and difference in our own time and lives.

The World Gallery was designed to appeal to repeat visitors, of which the Horniman has many. We worked alongside focus groups to ensure the text was accessible. The Horniman also has a strong network of community partners who contributed in different ways, from its design to the creation of engagement resources.

My hope is that over time, visitors will use this gallery to encounter other ways of understanding the world, which can fuel their creativity and help them imagine new ways of overcoming the challenges that face our communities today.

Robert Storrie is the keeper of anthropology at the Horniman Museum and Gardens, London