What does home mean?
At London’s newly reopened Museum of the Home, the trends of British domestic life over four centuries are chronicled in evocative detail. But, learns Ellie Fazan, finding the essence of home lies in understanding the feelings and needs that remain very similar down the generation
Home is a slippery concept. It is not merely bricks and mortar and assembled furniture. It’s the lives and memories that we make within it. You might find furniture in a museum. But home is a cast of meaningful things that carry memories and association, between them conveying a sense of belonging. “What does ‘home’ mean? It’s a feeling,” says Sonia Solicari. She’s been wrangling with the question since 2017 when she took on the job of director of the Museum of the Home.
Located in east London, in a row of Grade I-listed 18th-century almshouses formerly known as the Geffrye Museum, the space has been completely reimagined and reopened in June 2021 after a three-and-a-half-year hiatus, part due to extensive renovations, part due to Covid. “That’s the closest we come to answering the question. Instead we reflect the question back to our visitors, asking what does home mean to you?”
As much as the museum gives insight into how people lived through the ages, its refreshed Rooms Through Time galleries show the small details that give rise to emotional and psychological responses to home, many of which we share.
Home – no matter whether we grew up in a village or city, a country house or high-rise flat – is at once deeply personal and yet connects us all. The 1970s front room has been designed by artist Michael McMillan and reflects his experience of growing up in a West Indian household in Dalston during that time. “But the beautiful thing is people engage in it even if on the outside they have nothing in common with that,”
Sonia says. “You hear them say, ‘My auntie had one of those’, or pointing out the crumpled Woolworths bag in the corner.” We are connected, beyond our front rooms, by colours and objects and the memories they spark. Instead of lingering on our differences, the museum invites us to see how much we have in common. Our homes interact with the outside world, the cities and villages and streets that we live on. We are connected by our possessions and networks and memories.
In the museum is a new display of Domestic Game Changers, everyday objects from the past 400 years that have had a radical effect on how we live. These include the television, which moved leisure indoors, and Ikea’s Billy bookcase, which revolutionised the furniture market. It also includes a telephone that you can pick up and listen to different scenarios.