Bethnal Green Museum

Bethnal Green Museum

This is one of the earliest surviving examples of a prefabricated iron-framed building, originally constructed in South Kensington in 1856–7 and reassembled in Bethnal Green where it opened as a museum in 1872. The building was designed and erected under the supervision of Sir William Cubitt, with ironwork supplied by Charles Denoon Young & Company. James Wild, a notable mid-19th-century architect, designed its reassembly in Bethnal Green. The building was refurbished in the early 21st century.

The structure is an iron frame clad in red brick, with a slate roof in three spans topped by lantern lights running the full length of the ridges. The facade to Cambridge Heath Road features three gables divided by pronounced pilasters and modillion eaves cornice. Each gable contains a wide arched window divided by chamfered brick pilasters. Below this runs a full-width single-storey range, also divided into three parts with similar chamfered mullions between mid-20th-century metal-framed windows. The side elevations are divided into three storeys with gauged brick banding and dentillation. A raised basement below the main floor has large windows, and the upper level is marked by a mosaic panel to each bay, illustrating agriculture, the arts and sciences. These mosaics were designed by F.W. Moody and assembled by female students of the South Kensington Museum mosaic class.

The interior is dominated by a central full-height hall with a raised ground floor and mezzanine galleries around the perimeter. The exposed iron frame throughout comprises malleable bowstring roof trusses with continuous clerestory roof lights, slender cast-iron column uprights with arched braces featuring circular spandrels to the beams, and X-pattern balustrades. Some uprights were replaced during reassembly. The main hall floor is laid in black and white mosaic tile in guilloche pattern, apparently made by female convicts from Woking Gaol. Staircases with board-panelled balustrades were inserted at the time of reassembly. A fire escape and stair were added to the southeast corner in the late 20th century. The raised basement is used mainly for storage and contains some 20th-century interventions. The lower front range has 20th-century toilet blocks to each side.

The building originated as part of the first phase of the South Kensington Museum, planned by the Department of Science and Industry as a prefabricated temporary shed. William Cubitt, a well-known London building contractor with interests in new constructional systems, supervised its construction. He had previously exported prefabricated structures to Crimea during the Crimean War, which prompted the economic choice of this construction method. Cubitt engaged Charles Denoon Young and Company, a firm that had supplied ironwork to many buildings in the colonies and across Great Britain, including the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition buildings. In form and structure, the South Kensington Iron Museum resembled Joseph Paxton's nearby Crystal Palace, but it differed in its corrugated iron cladding. This unusually non-glassy skin, coupled with the building's massing of three barrel-vaulted spans, earned it the disparaging nickname of the 'Brompton Boilers'. An elegant iron arcade along the south front and a bright paint scheme were added to improve its appearance. The Iron Museum housed several collections, including the Museum of Ornamental Art and the Architectural Museum, a collection of casts used to educate carvers in the newly favoured Gothic style.

As the South Kensington Museum site expanded, the iron building was mostly dismantled in late 1867, with remaining bays demolished in 1899. Bethnal Green had been lobbying for a museum since 1857. After considerable debate and several designs, the Bethnal Green Museum opened on 24 June 1872, designed by James W. Wild, a notable mid-19th-century architect responsible for the Grade I Grimsby Dock Tower and associated with the South Kensington Museum as an expert on Arabian art. His design encased the original structure in red brick, presenting a far more attractive exterior with generous use of rubbed brick, decorated gables, large windows, and a parade of mosaic panels representing agriculture, the arts and sciences on both long elevations. The interior remains the most dramatic aspect: cathedral-like in scale and arrangement, with a tall central nave flanked by galleried aisles, all three ranges top-lit, and with the delicate but robust iron structure exposed. Most of the original structure survives, including the bowstring roof trusses, though some columns were replaced during re-erection. The museum initially held collections transferred from the South Kensington Museum. It was relaunched as the Museum of Childhood in 1974 and became the National Museum of Childhood in 1997.

This building is listed at Grade II* for its exceptional significance as one of the earliest surviving examples of a prefabricated iron-framed building—a landmark in constructional history closely related to other seminal structures such as the Crystal Palace and the Sheerness Boat Store. This bold group of mid-19th-century structures prompted further developments of fully-framed building design, leading to the skyscraper revolution of the later 19th century. It also has strong historic and cultural interest as the first building of what is now the Victoria and Albert Museum, guided in its constructional choice by the Crimean War, informed by leading builders and manufacturers of the period, and for its subsequent removal to and re-erection in Bethnal Green, where it survives as an accessible, structurally apparent and impressive structure. It has group value with the Eagle Slayer statue, railings, four lamp standards and St John's Church.