The Covid Diaries 1: The Wallace Collection

Review of the Wallace Collection. In which I am able to consume classic culture first-hand for the first time in many months, and am very happy as a result.

Getting Back Into London Culture, Starting with the Wallace Collection

Confession: I hadn’t been to the Wallace Collection for over 10 years before my recent trip to visit and review it. I know it’s free and it’s a great collection. I had even been planning on visiting their temporary exhibition Forgotten Masters. We are spoiled for choice for great, free museums in London though, and Old Masters/baroque/rococo aren’t really my thing. So it had been a while.

You know what though? I was so happy to be seeing artworks in the flesh that I would have loved anything, but I had a great time at the Wallace Collection. They have done some renovations since I was last there, so everything was looking good. It was well laid out and had good information labels. The bright colours and visually appealing layout also more than made up for my medium interest in the subject matter.

A Brave New World

As my first post-lockdown cultural outing, it was also a good first choice. The staff were what made it. They were all so visibly happy to be back at work, happy to be sharing their knowledge of the collection with visitors, and doing their best to make the new rules work smoothly. The Wallace has a lot of very small rooms so had posted maximum capacities outside each door. Sometimes the capacity is only 1 or 2 people at a time, which makes things tricky. Particularly where you have a slow visitor creating traffic jams. They were clear and consistent in guiding people through though, which made it easy to get the hang of.

It’s a strange new world though, so I felt myself in two modes at once. I was able to take my time and enjoy the artworks because of the lower than usual visitor numbers. I was also constantly hyper-aware of everyone around me and how many people were in the next room, to try to time my move precisely. It’s an odd feeling, but maybe one we will get used to.

On its own merits: 3.5/5
Implementing Covid rules: 4/5