London’s newest museum – the Chelsea Pensioners opens next week
London is getting a new museum next week, dedicated to the history of the Chelsea Pensioners, and it’s inside their recently restored stables block.
The stables block isn’t just a former horse stables though (although it was), but a grand set of stables designed by Sir John Soane, and they’ve undergone a £12.2 million refurbishment project. As part of that, the stables now include a new museum, which will be free to visit six days a week.
It is candidly a fairly small museum — more of an appetizer than a main course of the Pensioners’ history. Opening with a representation of the all-important communal main meal, the rest of the museum fills some of the old horse stables with snippets of the history of the Pensioners and the life of a Pensioner.
A large video room with touchscreen displays mounted on a replica of an early pensioner room starts the walk through the museum, which is mainly filled with a lot more video and oral history.
One stable tells a bit of the story about the famous red tunic and less famous but more often worn dark blue uniforms. One stable has a small number of actual artefacts, including some Dead Man’s Pennies – large medallions given to the relatives of those killed in WWI. Most of them were made in Woolwich, and a plaque was recently installed outside the Elizabeth line station telling their story.
Probably the most interesting part of the museum is a five-minute video projected onto a model of the Royal Hospital Chelsea that shows an abridged history of the buildings. It’s an effective way of showing how the buildings changed over the centuries, and when bombs hit some of the buildings, they blackened with smoke, and the model ground shook a bit.
At the end is the gift shop, of course, but it’s more than that. The shop doubles as the Chelsea Pensioners’ private post office — so you could, if you wanted to, post something from there as well. Or maybe buy some Chelsea Pensioner whisky for the loyal toast.
As a museum, personally I would have preferred more objects, and I felt the opening room would have been better filled with uniforms and regalia than large video screens. However, it is a nice free addition to London’s museums. It also has a cafe (of course), so you can sit in the courtyard and have a coffee and cake.
The museum is also right next to the National Army Museum, so I suggest visiting both on the same day rather than making a special trip — unless you’re a die hard museum completist like me.
The museum opens on Tuesday 1st October and will be open Tuesday to Sunday from then on. They recommend booking free tickets in advance when visiting, although walk-ins will be allowed if there’s space. You can find the Chelsea Pensioner Museum at the western end of the Royal Hospital Chelsea, next to the National Army Museum.
The museum will be closed to the public on Mondays but will be open for visits from local or disadvantaged groups.
Separate from the museum, there are also regular tours of the rest of the Royal Hospital, and those can be booked here.
Sadly it looks as though this has replaced the previous museum, which was at the other end of the Hospital and which WAS full of exhibits but lacked the “modern” must-have of lots of electronics and the ‘hunt the actual exhibit’ game If it has replaced this Museum then I would say that London has LOST a good Museum….