The wonderful Cartoon Museum is to get a new home!
My favorite little museum in the world has been existing of late under a cripplingly high rent for its site in Bloomsbury.
The good news is that it will soon move to a new site in Fitzrovia – and a fundraising drive is underway to help the transition which will safeguard this brilliant and resourceful little museum for the next 25 years. As soon as I have more details of any fundraising events, I'll post them here on The Daily Constitutional.
Here's how the news was announced last night…
Good luck (and thanks!) to everyone at The Cartoon Museum!
Here's a post from The DC archive on The Cartoon Museum. It's Panel 11 in my Cartoon & Comic Book Tour of London blog, a love letter to the best little corner of Bloomsbury…
(You can catch up with the with all the posts in my cartoon & Comic Book Tour Of London blog here: cartoonandcomicbooklondon.blogspot.co.uk)
Panel 11: The Cartoon Museum
There it is, tucked away in plain view, struggling to be noticed in the presence of that upstaging old ham The British Museum.
Just to clarify: the good people at the Cartoon Museum are not describing the BM as an "upstaging old ham". That's all my own work, folks.
Indeed when Anita O'Brien, the curator at the Cartoon Museum got in touch with The Daily Constitutional recently, one of the first things she did was direct us to the British Museum as a great resource for London-themed cartoons.
Anita was writing in response to my request for a London-themed cartoon recommendation and she sent us not one, but two, in the shape of this pair of marvelous Heath Robinsons…
The Cartoon Museum receives very little funding, yet manages to sustain a vivid, rolling programme of exhibitions covering everything from The Beano to William Hogarth.
The collection – rotated regularly – also features originals from Charles M Schultz and Doonesbury creator G.B Trudeau. I'm told that Trudeau dropped off the originals in person one day, traveling incognito - he enjoyed a mooch around the collection first - as a paying customer! Artists from George du Maurier to Gillray are also represented in the permanent collection alongside such diverse contemporary figures as Posy Simmonds (Tamara Drewe, Gemma Bovary) and Alan Moore (V For Vendetta, From Hell).
There are workshops for kids and courses for adults, too. There's a great bookshop, events and talks from the likes of Martin Rowson and no corporate coffee concession stinking the place up.
And I hear that there may even be a ghost on the premises, too.
Crikey!
www.cartoonmuseum.org
The Cartoon Museum
35 Little Russell Street
London
WC1A 2HH
A London Walk costs £10 – £8 concession. To join a London Walk, simply meet your guide at the designated tube station at the appointed time. Details of all London Walks can be found at www.walks.com