New Designs on Old Fossils

Millions spent on London's historic homes for heritage

It's been a month of large numbers. Millions and billions have been replaced by talk of trillions now. World leaders meeting in the capital for the G20 summit created headlines with their one-trillion-dollars-to-end-global-recession announcement.

Just a couple of weeks later we had Alistair Darling's budget… Ah, yes, the 'borrowing' budget. More billions upon billions... This time, its our national debt which is set to escalate to £1.4 trillion over the next five years. It reminds me of the school playground: "my dad's a million, trillion, billion, squillion times better than your dad".

Putting aside the government's "worst-in-peacetime-history budget" for a minute, and ignoring that fact that Britain is facing the "worst recession since World War II", there is good news to savour. With spending going towards something constructive: our national museums.

The British Museum has revealed designs for its forthcoming £135 million development project, the largest since the great court opened in 2000. Have you been to the British Museum lately? I dropped by this week to investigate a series of new galleries that have opened lately. First stop was new Medieval Gallery, housing the world famous and delightfully gloomy Lewis Chessmen. On past the Romans in England and a quick detour of the treasures from Sutton Hoo, the Anglo-Saxon burial mound, and I was at the Egyptian mummy collection. At the beginning of the year, this new Ancient Egyptian gallery opened, revealing the tomb-paintings (dating back to around 1350 BC) of accountant Nebamun, undergoing restoration since the late 1990s.

On this quick trip I didn't even have time to explore the Clocks and Watches gallery and the centre for Ceramic Studies which reputedly houses the finest collection of Chinese ceramics outside Beijing, Shanghai or Taipei, Taiwan. As is always the way with the British Museum, I left feeling inspired (just walking through the great court is enough) and vowing to return with more time to take in the rest.

But the British Museum isn't the only one spending money in the millions, passing the Victoria and Albert Museum you'll notice the scaffolding is up. This is because the V & A is spending a whooping £120 million on transforming an entire wing of the museum - and that's just the budget for the first phase. The Theatre and Performance Galleries opened in March and the Asian Buddhist Sculpture Gallery - four rooms exploring the images of the Buddha Sakyamuni - launches this month.

Further new galleries to follow are the Gilbert Collection - moved from Somerset House - which opens in June, the first phase of the Ceramics Galleries launching in September (with the second phase due in 2010), and the magnificent £30 million Medieval and Renaissance Galleries. Due to open in November, these ten new galleries in the process of being sanded down and plastered over have prompted the mammoth task of redisplaying more than 1,800 objects, the casket for the relics of St Thomas Becket among them.

On the other side of Exhibition Road, the Natural History Museum is getting ready to launch its £78 million Darwin Centre, due to open this autumn. You can already see the towering glass structure of the 8-storey addition to the landmark building from the museum’s Wildlife Garden close to Queen's Gate road. Billed as "the most significant expansion at the Museum since it moved to South Kensington in 1881", the focus of the new Darwin Centre is a giant cocoon built to house millions of specimens and state-of-the-art science facilities. The museum pieces - which include specimens collected by Charles Darwin himself - are being moved in as we speak.

Despite the multi-millions being spent on these significant developments all of these museums are still free to enter. Thankfully. So if you're feeling the pinch from Alistair's less-than-darling budget get yourself to one of these magnificent, money-no-object museums.

Sugar for Mayor

He's only been in the job for a year but already Londoners are deciding who they'd vote for to replace Boris as mayor. Sir Alan 'you're hired' Sugar is the somewhat surprising candidate of choice, according to a recent Evening Standard poll. Approached by Labour as their man for London in an attempt to stop Ken Livingstone standing again, a confident Sugar has declared the job would be a "walk in the park". Mr Johnson, meanwhile, he said it's "extremely likely" that he would run for the mayoralty again, prompting speculation he's lining himself up for the Prime Minister position. His reply: "absolute nonsense".

Deptford vs Dalston

Just one month after the New York Times wrote in praise of New Cross and Deptford for its "rude boys and art students with asymmetric haircuts" giving the place 'an edge' (22 March), Paul Flynn in the Guardian put forward the argument that Dalston is "now the coolest place in Britain" (27 April). Some New Cross locals were left scratching their heads that anyone in New York had noticed that them at all. But these assertions and counter claims in the press have sparked a whole series of debates with Luke Lewis writing in the NME, "If Dalston is the coolest place in Britain, God help us all". Nights like Disco Bloodbath and obnoxious DJs confirm this as a "wretched place" for him. Deptford or Dalston... we wait to see which East London suburb emerges as the king of cool.

Indian Summer

The British Museum is promising an Indian summer with their 'Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur' exhibition beginning next month complemented by an outdoor display in the museum's great forecourt by Kew Gardens. Focussing on the 18th and the first half of the 19th centuries, the exhibition will feature a loan of fifty-five works from the Mehrangarh Museum Trust in Jodhpur, never seen in the UK before. But they're not the only ones who've come up with this bright idea. The V & A have chosen the same subject for their blockbuster exhibition later in the year. 'Maharaja: The Splendour of India's Royal Courts' (opening 10th October) has objects on loan from the royal collections of Udaipur and Jodhpur from the 18th century to 1947, many of which have never before been seen in the UK. Is this is the museum equivalent of turning up to the same party in the same dress as your arch rival?

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