Seven Christmas Trees in One Night

A quick bus ride up from Liverpool Street station and we arrived at Flowers East, a gallery that I've meant to visit for a long time, but only ever seem to remember when the gallery was between shows. Well, we happened to walk past the (closed) gallery after our visit to Shoreditch Town Hall several days ago, and the large pieces in the front gallery space caught our attention, so we finally stopped in today at what turned out to be a fantastic gallery space, spread over two levels and numerous rooms. The ground-floor exhibit was a strangely compelling array of layered pieces depicting various buildings in a housing estate,

while the first floor held two equally interesting exhibits, one of British abstract prints (including several wonderfully conceived optical illusions) and the other of 100 postcard-sized abstract watercolours, many of which were quite pleasing. The three interesting exhibitions, along with the gallery's small bookshop made me regret not making it to the gallery sooner! From Flowers East, it was a very short walk to the Geffrye Museum, a great place where we haven't been for a very long time. The Geffrye was all decked out for Christmas, with a lovely tree in the almshouse courtyard,

and we listened to carollers while we sipped our coffees in the museum restaurant.

Two exhibits are currently on show at the Geffrye--the first is an annual show, Christmas Past: 400 Years of Seasonal Traditions in English Homes, which dresses up the museum's permanent exhibit of English front rooms with period Christmas decorations. It's a simple idea, but one that works very nicely in conveying changes in taste over the centuries. The early seventeenth century brings minimal greenery into the home, and a table filled with sweet treats:

The early-eighteenth-century room is decorated with bay and rosemary, and seasonal treats including Christmas punch, olives, and anchovies:

By the mid-eighteenth century, we see a table set for the family to enjoy glasses of cordial and wine:

The late-eighteenth-century family is ready for the roast beef and plum pudding (which was served with the beef, rather than afterwards) of their celebratory meal:

The early-nineteenth-century table features a Twelfth-Night cake (albeit with more elaborate decorations and without the traditional pea and bean baked into the cake whose lucky recipients would be crowned the Twelfth-Night queen and king, respectively) along with the cards that determined players in the Twelfth-Night game, which was similar to a game of charades:

The mid-nineteenth-century room starts to look very familiar, with presents under a decorated Christmas tree setting the tone for the season. According to the Geffrye, many people are under the false notion that Prince Albert introduced the custom of the Christmas tree to England, although his fondness for the custom and the published illustrations of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert's family standing around their 1848 Christmas tree are thought to have popularised the tradition in England. A custom in Germany since the sixteenth century, Queen Charlotte (the German wife of King George III) is thought to be the first person to introduce the Christmas tree to England in the 1780s and 1790s, as she brought the custom to her young family.

The late-nineteenth-century room shows two distinct features: decorations that demonstrate the exoticization of all things from the so-called Far East, and a mantle display of Christmas cards, which the Geffrye informed me is an English invention, initially given by children to their parents as a means to demonstrate good handwriting, and reaching commercial popularity in the 1870s, with the introduction of cheap postal rates for cards.

In the room representing the very early 1900s, gifts wait under the Christmas tree to be wrapped, but the mother who bought them is "exhausted after the hustle and bustle of Oxford Street and Regent Street and the crowded journey back on the underground train." Hmmm . . . doesn't sound all that different from the very early 2000s!

The early 1900s display is of a fashionable London flat, with artificial decorations (deemed cheaper and cleaner than live greenery) setting the scene for a Christmas cocktail party.

The mid-1900s room is full of discarded wrapping on Christmas morning,

and the museum's final room, from the 1990s, is of a Christmas dinner with friends, hosted by professionals in their loft conversion in newly-hip Shoreditch:

The second exhibit at the Geffrye was a continuation of the previous exhibit we saw, focussing on depictions of homes and gardens, this time from 1960 to 2004:

Full of lovely pieces in a variety of styles, and across many familiar parts of London (including Stokey!), the small exhibition is definitely worth a visit. Our last brief stop was in the museum's reading room, filled with fantastic home and design magazines that I could have spent hours reading: