Rooms Through Time: Winter Past, Museum of the Home, London

Following the relaunch of its perennially popular Rooms Through Time exhibition in July, Hoxton's Museum of the Home has decked the halls of its household displays to tell a series of winter stories from London’s past, present and future.

The permanent exhibition – a series of reconstructed household rooms transporting the visitor from London in 1630 to a speculative vision of the capital in 2049 – has been subtly altered to reflect what each group of characters would do to celebrate the festive season.

With only minimalistic Christmas decorations in the wider museum – a pared-back wreath made from red and green ribbon here and there – the visitor’s focus is squarely on the winter scenarios themselves.

These scenarios range from a newly immigrated Irish family preparing for Midnight Mass in the 1950s to a Jewish family in the Rothschild Buildings celebrating Hanukkah at the turn of the century, to a prediction of new winter holidays that may be invented and widely commemorated in the near future. 

Coherent narratives

The challenge inherent in curating seasonal exhibits is to ensure that the museum tells a fresh story in line with its values, rather than overlaying festive decorations onto an existing exhibit without saying anything new.

The Museum of the Home skirts this potential problem by not only creating festive visual displays, but constructing detailed, and often poignant, narratives that acknowledge a range of responses to the festive season.

One highlight of this narrative-building is the 2005 ex-council flat rented by a group of queer and trans friends in the aftermath of the repeal of section 28.

Beneath the veneer of sparkling festive outfits, Christmas CDs for visitors to rifle through, and ultra-specific nostalgic touches like an old issue of the Guardian Guide and Absolutely Fabulous on the television (I would have liked to see more holiday-specific audio of this type integrated into the rest of the galleries), the display hints at the complex relationship many queer people have with the holidays, with a label acknowledging the familial misgendering faced by the fictional tenants.

Perhaps where the narrative building has been most inventive is in the curation of the Innovo Room of the Future where, in 2049, a polyamorous “throuple” and members of their extended family are celebrating a holiday apparently introduced in the late 2030s, called “Renew Year’s Eve”.

Visitors may wonder if New Year’s Eve, already a secular and multicultural celebration, would need to be replaced by something the museum refers to as “a way of uniting people from all faiths and backgrounds”. 

Nevertheless, the museum has risen to the challenge of putting a festive twist on the futuristic display’s regular themes of sustainability and generative AI, imagining that the “farm-free” protein-generating machine in the year-round display may produce “turkettes” for the festive dinner.

The smaller details here, such as a “Skibidi Christmas” card and a commemorative mug for Taylor Swift’s 40th anniversary tour, are humorous and well observed.

Attention to detail

Another strength of Winter Past is its attention to detail and specificity. Each scenario taking place after 1878 has been curated in collaboration with the museum’s group of community authors, and this public engagement is reflected in the hyper-personal slices of life on display.

Aside from its surface level, period-specific details – the Elvis record about to be wrapped by an Irish couple newly arrived in 1950s Camden, or marble paper Christmas cards in a Victorian townhouse – Winter Past is at its strongest when it adds a level of detail to the display that illuminates a broader social history. 

The Irish couple’s family members have sent over a whole turkey because of their worries over post-war food shortages in London, and any sentimentalism lingering in the Victorian scene is tempered by the Union flags hung on the tree and the spices on the table that make the family’s Indian ayah long for home. 

Occasionally, there are striking images conjured by the written narrative, such as the Vietnamese Nguyens living in present day London needing to unscrew a door to make a table to accommodate their entire extended family, that I would have liked to see represented in the visual display.

The exhibit falls flat when it occasionally fails to fill out this wider story, or shoehorns in details that feel too generic. The Hanukkah scene set in 1913 acknowledges that the family it represents are celebrating the festival in safety after fleeing persecution, but unfortunately does not add much beyond a menorah on the mantelpiece and a discarded dreidel to distinguish this family from other East End households of the period. A brief note explaining the origins of the Jewish festival borders on patronising to the visitor.

Similarly, a note on the frequent blackouts in 1970s Hackney in the British Caribbean Christmas party display fails to be specific either to the festive period or to the community it represents.

Winter Past is, however, admirable in the ambition of stories and experiences of the festive season that it attempts to cover, and does so with a pleasing balance of nostalgia, cultural commentary, and sensitivity.

Winter Past runs until 12 January 2025