Housewarming: A Front Room in the 1970s

Atrium

Free

It’s game night at the Museum! Join us for dominoes, Monopoly, and Ludo, inspired by games played in front rooms and those on display in A Terraced House in 1978. 

Studio

Free

Tales from the Front Room is a 60min BBC4 documentary in which a host of British Caribbean figures, including the late Stuart Hall, share memories of their front rooms kept pristine for guests that was an aspect of coloniality of the Windrush generation.   

Forced to live in one room arriving in Britain, the front room was an aspiration and, like the Sunday Best they'd arrived in, the room bestowed dignity and respectability like other migrant and working-class communities. Viewed chronologically from 1948 to the present and using a mixture of interviews, archive footage and mood reconstructions, the film explores the experiences of an evolving private space, illuminating much of the British experience of the last half century. 

Run time: 60 minutes

Ticketed £5 | Booking required

Explore the seven newest period rooms in our Rooms Through Time in this curator-led tour. Discover the personal stories, objects and process of curating the gallery, delving deeper into A Terraced House in 1978.

Atrium

Shake a leg to Michael McMillan’s selection of reggae, soul, calypso, funk, hip-hop, high-life, dancehall, and jazz classics. 

Chapel

Free | Run-time: 21 minutes, looped

First performed in the Museum’s Almshouse in 2019, Waiting for Myself to Appear is a one-woman show that weaves together contemporary and historic stories through the voice of Alisha, a young British Caribbean woman growing up in a gentrified Hackney.  

The piece explores themes around the colonial exploitation of Black women’s bodies, their struggles to survive the trauma of diaspora migration and making a home in post-imperial Britain. It is written and directed by Michael McMillan, performed by Esther Niles, with music and visuals from the multidisciplinary do Dubmorphology. 

Free

Writer, playwright, artist/curator and scholar Michael McMillan will be signing copies of The Front Room: Diaspora Migrant Aesthetics in the Home. This beloved and much-praised book provides fascinating revelations into the post-war British experience of immigrants, the decoration of their living spaces and their position in society in relation to decolonisation.  

Our bar will be serving up delicious snacks and drinks.

Michael McMillan, Arts.D. is a London based writer, playwright, artist/curator and academic of Vincentian heritage, best known for his beloved and much praised, The West Indian Front Room, which was the Geffrye Museum’s successful exhibition (2005-06). It has since been iterated in the Netherlands, Curacao, Johannesburg, Arles and Toronto inspired the BBC4 documentary Tales from the Front Room (2007), part of Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s-Now (Tate Britain 2021-22, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto 2022-23), and the basis of his book, The Front Room: Diaspora migrant Aesthetics in the Home (Lund Humphries 2023). The Front Room is also permanently at the Museum of the Home (formerly the Geffrye Museum), where Waiting for myself to appear his triptych film installation produced in collaboration with Dubmorphology is also on permanent display. Other work includes: Sonic Vibrations: Sound systems, lovers rock and dub, Walking in the Wake, a short produced for the Estuary Festival 2021, and I Miss My Mum’s Cookin’, which was nominated for a Brighton Fringe award.  

McMillan has the first Arts Doctorate from Middlesex University (2010), and is currently an Associate Lecturer in Cultural & Historical Studies at London College of Fashion (UAL), and VIAD Senior Research Associate at University of Johannesburg.   

https://www.michaelmcmillan.uk/  

Designed in the late 1960s, the De Beauvoir Estate in Hackney aimed to accommodate all needs with high-rise and mid-rise flats, as well terraced houses like this one, centred around shops and communal areas. It was part of a long-running housing initiative which resulted in nearly 6.5 million council homes by the late 1970s

Find out more

Celebrate our newest, permanent gallery, this Museum Late series unpacks the stories of our seven new Rooms Through Time and explore what Home can mean. Explore how homes have evolved aesthetically alongside societal shifts, and enjoy a lively night at the Museum.