Friday 10 July 2009

Lichfield's Darwin House Relaunched

I'm a bit embarrassed that it's taken me a whole week to blog on this, but last weekend we spent a pleasant few hours at a small market outside the Erasmus Darwin House (see below) and also enjoyed free entry inside, to mark the relaunch of the museum after a £100,000 refurbishment (as reported by the Lichfield Blog).


I noticed that they had removed the life-sized sculpture of Darwin from downstairs and turned the room into a re-creation of the doctor's study, with some nifty projection that reminded me a lot of the Benjamin Franklin Museum in London. I also liked the armchairs in the sitting room at the front, with built-in speakers and headphones playing domestic dialogues and snatches of Darwin's poetry (again, this was not unlike the chairs in the Handel room at the Foundling Museum where you can listen to Messiah etc.)


We didn't get our silhouettes made (see above) but did end up buying some wine and a vine from Halfpenny Green Vineyard which is studded with tiny green grapes. We think that Darwin would have approved.

Photographs © Memoirs of the Celebrated Mrs Woffington.

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