The Brooking Collection of Architectural Design

One of the things I notice most when I go to things around the capital - and indeed the world, is that I almost always manage to find some link with Greenwich. It's so - well - omnipresent - that there always seems to be something curious I haven't heard of before comes out of a day trip elsewhere.

And so it was with a trip I took on Friday to the Guildhall Art Gallery, a place you should visit if you get the opportunity. It houses some incredible works, many to do with the history of the City, and not a few of those gems you see incessantly reproduced on birthday cards - the sort where you think 'blimey - I had no idea that was there...'

I hadn't actually gone for the art (although I tagged onto a free 'highlights' tour which was well worth joining) or even the Roman amphitheatre which lurks eerily in the bowels of the building. I had gone to see a current exhibition of stuff which used to be in the City but now resides elsewhere, The City Beyond the Square Mile.

I had thought that the best Greenwich would do out of the exhibition would be a mention of the glorious stained glass from the Baltic Exchange, now rather stunningly displayed in the Maritime Museum, but then I saw a curiously dusty-looking little case with sundry items in, such as letterboxes and architraving, with an even dustier-looking (curious - the exhibition's temporary and has only been open a couple of weeks) note next to it.

The Brooking Collection of Architectural Detail was started by Charles Brooking, at the age of 12, in 1966, in his parents' shed in the back garden (I wonder if he and Robert Opie get together from time to time - they have much in common.) It is, much like the Opie Collection, a gathering together of the sort of stuff people throw away until it's too late and we realise we've lost something visceral from our common history. In Charles Brooking's case, that stuff is architectural detail - doorknobs and knockers, letterboxes and hinges, skirting and architrave, staircases and stained glass.

He's been collecting and cataloguing it ever since but it long ago became a tad too big for his dad's shed. In 1986 the Dartford campus of the University of Greenwich (yes, I, too am still trying to work out just what Greenwich University is doing in Dartford, but in this case, I don't care) offered to take the collection and turn it into a museum, but it all went a bit pear-shaped in 2002 when the university sold the site.

So - guess where it languishes today? In storage at the Pepys Stable Block in the Old Royal Naval College. Apparently professionals and students can still gain access, but it's not open to the public any more. Tsk. The label in the exhibition states, vaguely, that there, "it's hoped that a national archive of period detail will be established for the use of architects, historians and the general public."

We'll see.

There's one bright spot though. Charles Brooking still has his own museum, presumably in his latest garden shed, at Cranleigh, Surrey which is open by appointment, by phoning 01483 274203.

Beside The Seaside

National Maritime Museum

I didn't know this was on until a leaflet fell out of my copy of Time Out. This keeps happening. It drives me nuts that I have to find out about a local exhibition through a London-wide advertising strategy, when I walk past the place virtually every day.

Admittedly once I knew about it and had already decided to go, there was a poster for the show just outside the entrance - but most locals don't make a habit of walking right up to the entrance of the museum. I know they have a limited budget - and they need to direct most of it at tourists, but it's our museum too and a poster outside the gates where people actually pass wouldn't break the bank, surely? (If there is one, I haven't seen it...)

Beside the Seaside is an exhibition of photographs in the little exhibition area that used to house the Titanic stuff. It doesn't quite deliver what it promises, but is still worth a visit, if only to see just how similar to each other British resorts looked around the turn of the last century.

The bulk of the pictures come from the Frith collection - when the company ceased trading in 1971, a large number of negatives found their way to the museum and this is an attempt to show a small fraction of them.

It's billed as "snapshots of British coastal life, 1880 - 1950," which I took rather literally - that it would actually be 'snapshots,' probably by amateurs, of holidays and fishing, piers and seaside rock, spread over that whole period.

Instead, it tends to be landscapes and portraits, almost certainly by professionals, mainly, it would seem, taken around the Edwardian period. And there's no denying it's interesting with some of the shots stunning indeed.

The pictures are grouped in geographical areas, usually one photo per resort/coastal town, and do really tell a tale of another world - grizzled fishermen mending their lobster pots, grizzled women, probably much younger than they look, gutting fish, ladies in long black skirts and crisp white blouses, gigantic hats perched on their heads, taking the sea air in groups, their nannies following at an appropriate distance with perambulators.

There is much to enjoy. I particularly liked the dapper gent in blazer and straw boater, drinking-in the exotic air at Torquay, surrounded by palm trees and cacti. And I definitely have to take a trip to Gravesend now, to find out what happened to that gigantic white castle of a building on the promenade.

There's some fuzzy footage of newsreels and a couple of train posters - presumably to keep to the promise of the period reaching to the 1950s - and a case containing some Punch and Judy puppets for no other reason than, it seems, they were worried the pictures alone wouldn't be enough of a draw.

But I don't get the feeling that hearts were particularly in this exhibition. For a subject that should be uplifting and joyful - everyone loves the seaside, don't they? - to me it has a curiously downbeat feel. It is neither a wholly photographic piece, nor a proper 'exhibit.' Was cash tight? I find that hard to believe - the NMM has to be one of the richest museums we've got. It is a temporary exhibition, of course, but it has the feel of a temporary exhibition. That it's just filling in while they're waiting for the main attraction.


And what is the main attraction? Don't ask me. You'll just have to wait for a leaflet to fall out of Time Out...

Body Worlds.

So. As the monster Tutankhamen exhibition rumbles to a close at the Dome, we look towards the next blockbuster - Bodyworlds.

I confess that the stripping down of dead (I prefer "differently manifested" - we Phantoms are sensitive about such loaded words...) bodies and reinventing them as art leaves me pretty much literally cold although I daresay it will pack in the crowds, if not quite in the numbers that visited King Tut.

But however radical the exhibits of Gunther Von Hagens may be, to me this is a logical step on from the sort of entertainment that regularly appeared at the Greenwich Fair twice a year.

There were all sorts of freakshows - from Royal Waxworks where "the whole court of France is to be seen," through prize fighters and quack-doctors, to a German ox with six legs and a 'learned dog who could shuffle and cut" - but there were dead bodies too.

Ok - so we went to gawp at the corpses hanging from gibbets whereas these bodies are donated but in some respects there will always be a question looming over an exhibit like this. However much it's dressed up as "educational" and "scientific," it is, let's face it, just a good old-fashioned circus sideshow, albeit on giant proportions. "Plastination," the name for Von Hagens's technique, is a wonderful word - and sounds just like one of the cures a quack doctor from the 19th Century would use for a miracle cure.

I guess it's hard to follow an act like Tutankhamen (another dead body if you want to get technical, though of course we only saw the results of unwrapping him.)The site is set up for blockbusters and they don't come along too often. The other giant hitter, the Terracotta Army, has just been to London and Pompeii doesn't look like it's coming our way any time soon (more death with both of these - what is it about us and death..?)

Which massive exhibition would you like to see coming to the O2 next? And while we're about it, there's still loads and loads of room inside that Dome. Maybe we should be putting first-dibs on what we'd like to see in the rest of the space. My own personal choice would be a bowling alley. I'd want it all retro like Bloomsbury Lanes - though maybe without the karaoke.

Any other ideas?