Treasure houses of our Heritage: Places to visit

Treasure Houses of our Heritage PLACES TO VISIT

We look here at some of the immense variety of artefacts to be found and enjoyed in Europe’s museums. They range from man’s earliest creations, through Roman and medieval relics, to survivors of our industrial age – treasures perhaps of the future. RICHARD K. EVANS FRPS

Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Marble statue ‘Vertumnus and Pomona’, made in 1725 by sculptor Laurent Delvaux.

Kremlin Museum, Moscow. The ‘Czar’s Cannon’ of 1586, ordered by Ivan IV. It weighs 40 tons and has a 35-inch bore.

Museum of the North, Beamish, County Durham. This four-wheeled tank engine is preserved and active hauling visitors at the Beamish site; it was built by the North Eastern Railway in 1890.

Museum of Mechanical Musical Instruments, Rudesheim, Germany. Titled ‘A Musical Celebration in the Land of the Dolls’, this is the largest Orchestrion with automata ever made. It was constructed in Buffalo, New York in 1890 by Bernhard Duffner from Furtwangen in Bavaria’s Black Forest, from where he had emigrated in 1865. The 27 dancers and instrumentalists are operated pneumatically, playing and dancing to eleven different tunes.

Ulster Folk Museum, Northern Ireland. The Corner Shop, one of many buildings typifying life throughout Ulster. The calendar on the door shows the date to be November 1919.

Museum of Archaeology, Nicosia, Cyprus. Some of the 2,000 sixth-century BC terracotta figures found in the Sanctuary of Ayia Irini (St Irene) in north-west Cyprus.

Norwegian Maritime Museum, Oslo. First-ever crossing from Greenland, through the North-West Passage to the Bering Strait, was made by Roald Amundsen during 1903-06 in this sloop Gjøa, built in Rosendal in 1872. After lying in San Francisco for over 60 years, the vessel was returned to Bygdøy, Norway in 1972.

The Museum of London. With a population of some 45,000, Roman Londinium in the first and second centuries AD was the largest city in Britain and a major international port. This diorama depicts shipping activities on the river Thames at that time.

Ethnographic Museum of Georgia. Re-creation of a typical Caucasian mountain farmer’s house of the early 19th century, Batuni.

Royal Saxon Porcelain Museum, Germany. Porcelain figurines modelled about 1745 by Johann Kandler, one of the Meissen factory’s most famous craftsmen.

Blaufarveverket, Norway. Bobbin lacemaking was a popular and profitable craft for European ladies throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. This example is displayed in the mine-manager’s house, now open as a museum, at Norway’s long-closed cobalt mines in Telemark.

Geffrye Museum, London. Here in the former Almshouses of the Ironmongers Company are living-room settings dating from 1630 to the 1990s, all furnished in correct period style. Pictured is a first-floor drawing room as it would have appeared in the home of a well-off city family in the 1830s.

The Shuttleworth Remembrance Trust Old Warden aerodrome near Bedford is the home of the Shuttleworth Collection of historic aircraft, many of them regularly flown. This Avro Tutor trainer dates from 1931.

Museum of the Conservatori, Rome. Second-century relief, about 6ft x 4ft, celebrating the triumph in battle of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius.

The Science Museum, London. Part of the London Clockmakers’ Company collection, this mahogany-cased eight-day spring clock was made by William (?) Johnson of Gray’s Inn Passage in 1780.

Horniman Museum, London. Collections of preserved birds and insects were popularly displayed in wealthy Victorian and Edwardian homes. This realistic diorama is one of several in London’s Arts & Crafts style museum in Forest Hill.

National Car Museum, Mulhouse, France. Bugatti eight-cylinder Type 55 roadster, built in Molsheim near Strasbourg in 1932 – an icon of 1930s sports car design. It is one of some 120 Bugatti cars owned by the brothers Schlumpf which formed the basis of this museum’s collection.