Continuing our series on local history museums, with this west London gem.
Not many museums could credibly combine Daleks and Lucozade in the same display. The recently renovated Gunnersbury Park Museum can, because it plaits the highly varied histories of both Ealing and Hounslow boroughs.
The Dalek represents the area's film and TV heritage. Ealing Studios is just along the road, of course, but many other productions have filmed in the area. 1988 Doctor Who story Remembrance of the Daleks, for example, shot key scenes at what is now the Museum of Water and Steam in Brentford, while the Doctor's companion Ace came from Perivale in Ealing.
The Lucozade sign shows a different side to the boroughs. For half a century, a luminous advert for the pleasantly weird orange drink welcomed drivers on the M4 to London. The sign was taken down in 2004, but the museum has preserved it.
This is one of London's oldest — and grandest — local museums. It opened in 1929 inside an old mansion that had previously belonged to the Rothschild banking family. The extensive grounds, meanwhile, became Gunnersbury Park.
It's a funny old museum. Some of the grandest rooms are left entirely empty, presumably to the benefit of private events. Meanwhile, the many exhibits — from prehistoric flints to Freddie Mercury's artwork — are crowded into the smaller anterooms. It's a good compromise, but makes for a somewhat unusual experience, dipping from a grand nothingness into a dark cabinet of curiosities.
If you're looking for some choice bits of London social history, it doesn't disappoint. One corner cabinet is devoted to Stanley Green, the Ealing eccentric famed for his protests against the eating of protein in the 1960s to 1990s. Upstairs, you'll find a Brompton bike (despite the name, produced in Brentford), a model of the street in Passport to Pimlico (Ealing comedy), and a local whetstone, inscribed with the legend that it had been used for sharpening knives for a 1,000 years (the final zero possibly added in jest).
The museum also does a good job of acknowledging the many faiths and nationalities who have thrived in the borough. The fashion gallery, for example, includes clothing of Asian heritage alongside traditional British dress.
It's a fascinating and varied place to wander around, though if you're looking for some kind of narrative history of the boroughs, you'll probably be disappointed. It's more a collection of cultural objects collected in themed areas, rather than a through-line or chronology of Ealing and Hounslow's histories.
The wider park is a superb place to explore, with loads of follies, fake ruins and other oddments that old-time toffs liked to stuff their gardens with. The collection of trees is particularly impressive, and the park does a good job of labelling them up so you can tell your Serbian spruce from your Douglas fir.
Gunnersbury Park Museum is in Gunnersbury Park. Nearest station Acton Town. Entrance is free.
