A LONDON FAMILY 1870-1900 by Molly Hughes. Penny Dolan

Bookshelves, like time capsules, give glimpses of past lives, stories and enthusiasms.

Decluttering, I came across a title my mother inherited from her oldest brother: A LONDON GIRL OF THE EIGHTIES by Molly Hughes. The merry, positive tone, read many decades before, did not feel ‘Victorian’ at all. 

This time, after a couple of chapters, I started looking for information on Molly Hughes. Back then, the task would have needed a bus ride to the public library before I could even begin. Now, ‘Molly’ simply appeared on my screen. 

I discovered that my book was, in fact, the middle title of a trilogy. Molly Hughes had written all three during her retirement, living in a cottage in Cuffley, Hertfordshire. Intrigued, and hoping that Molly’s memories might help with one of my own fictitious characters, I placed an order for the trilogy,

A LONDON FAMILY 1870-1900, the full second-hand trilogy, arrived on the front step, 

And then? I read them all.

A LONDON CHILD OF THE SEVENTIES, pub 1934.

Molly wrote her autobiography to show that ‘Victorian children did not have such a dull time as is usually supposed,’ and her own energy and appreciation of life seem the opposite of what the straight-laced term ‘Victorian’ once suggested.

Her parents, Tom and Mary Thomas, and their family led a quiet, respectable middle-class life in a three-storey house in Canonbury Park, North London. 'We were just an ordinary, suburban, Victorian family, undistinguished ourselves and unacquainted with distinguished people,' says Molly.

Tom, her father, is a stockbroker in the City. He and Mary are very aware of the flow of money, and the need to live according to their social class. Tom declares that ‘a settled income has its attractions possibly, but it can never be the fun of an unsettled one,’ letting the family enjoy the spending any windfall that comes their way, while living as cheaply as possible in between. 

Despite the optimism, daily life is not without problems. Mary, his wife, seems to manage the home without permanent servants or nursery help, and worries about afternoon visitors who stay until they must be offered food when nothing is left in the pantry. The family willingly  manage,avoiding parties and costly social obligations, although Molly describes her mother telling an over-long visitor how lovely she finds sitting in the dark, looking out at the street-lights. The visitor left,unaware Mary was concealing the results of an unpaid gas bill.

Tom and Mary clearly took pride in their four sons but, when Mary’s fifth baby proved a daughter, she was so delighted she leapt out of bed to see her, and made to lie down promptly for the sake of her health. Molly, as a result, always felt that, like Beatrice, a 'merry star’ had danced at her birth and, despite being the youngest, always felt loved and encouraged in whatever she wanted to do.

Each of her four brothers had a different character: the oldest, Thomas, was good at his studies, including Latin; the second - Vivian known as Dym - was quick at maths, science and had a secret love of poetry; the third, Charles, was only interested in art, painting and churches, while the youngest, Barnholt, tagged along after his brothers or lived in a world of his own.

The children were given a space of their own: a large third-floor room with a fire, a carpet, an ottoman, pictures that they liked and a window-seat that looked down and across the road junction. With few toys, they made use of a huge box of blocks, books and bits of furniture, and damaged toy soldiers to stage interesting battles and strategy games, along with cloaks, hats and dressing up clothes for acting out dramas and stories. The children had pens and ink for writing, paint & paper for drawing and sketching – a useful skill at a time when cameras were not available – as well as playing cards, all sorts of board games and a collection of much-loved, much-read story books. In addition, each boy had a shelf for their own interests and box of treasures, and Molly would surely have had one herself too.

Molly writes about visits to all sorts of amusements: the Boat Race; the Diving Bell at the Polytechnic, displays at the Agricultural Hall, or tickets to see Irving in ‘The Bells’, re-enacted at home, She also describes the older boys secretly daring each other to roof-high climbing challenges, or taking young Barnholt, disguised as Guy Fawkes, on a street-corner begging venture with a barrel-organ grinder, and other hidden activities. Molly describes many of these trips and incidents as well as if she had been present but she and her mother often stayed at home, whether from choice, because of Molly's youth or because of the cost. 

Occasionally, the boys did include Molly: one afternoon, knowing she longed to take a bus ride, they smuggled her outside, up the ladder on the back of the bus, across the sloping roof and in beside the driver at the front of his horse-drawn bus. The boys also managed to divert their mother’s attention from the mud on their delighted sister’s shoes on their return. The book gives a remarkable picture of the sibling relationships; while Molly herself is eager to learn from her brothers, they in turn are eager she should not grow up as one of those despised ‘silly girls’ with no sense in her head.

Religious observance is still important or expected. On Sundays the whole family walk almost two miles to St Paul’s Cathedral for the service with its hour-long sermon and then back again, with occasional other churches to add variety. Only the glorious sound of the organs and the beauty of the choral music made the constant church-going bearable, says Molly. 

Molly's balance of topics in these books can be slightly idiosyncratic, but that also tells the reader what matters to the writer. For example, one chapter describes all the packing and preparation needed for a family trip to Cornwall, followed by a description of the whole journey by steam trains from St Pancras to Penzance. 

The Thomas family are visiting Reskadinnick, near Camborne, which Molly describes as ‘more than a mere home or house or farm.’ Built on land owned by her grandfather, who had been a mining-prospector all over the world, the secure and comfortable family home is managed by Tony, his daughter and Molly’s ‘golden aunt’. These chapters give the reader  a sense of the whole Cornish coastal setting, before mass tourism hits the landscape. That beauty and the carefree life in and around the house are clearly idyllic moments for Molly, her mother and all the family.

Gradually. though, the children get older. The boys are sent to school: Thomas to his father’s old school in Shrewsbury and the three younger boys to the Merchant Taylor School in London. Molly goes to school each day, and for a while all seems settled. Then, suddenly, on the final pages, after a diversion about the dreadful London smogs, tragedy strikes: their father is killed, and Molly's childhood is over.


A LONDON GIRL OF THE EIGHTIES, pub 1936.

After her father’s death, and its financial impact, Molly’s education has even more importance. Along with her friend Winnie, a kindred spirit, she studies for and passes the Oxford Senior Local Examination. This award was not enough to help Molly with her next ambition, that of becoming a pupil at the North London Collegiate School for Ladies. Fortunately, Tony, Molly’s beloved ‘golden aunt’, offers to pay her fees. Molly entrance is barred at the last moment: every pupil, no matter how knowledgeable, must be able to sew a buttonhole. Fortunately, after a weekend of practising, Molly is allowed to take her self-sewn button-hole along, and starts her first term.

The North London Collegiate was the first academic school for girls in London and was led by the famous headmistress Miss Buss who, with Miss Beale, was one of a pair of great protagonists for female education. In addition to the usual subjects, the rigorous timetable included the study of Maths, Science, Latin and Greek, although Molly's descriptions of the classes do not sound as startlingly exciting as she or we would wish. Aware of the prohibitive fees at NLCS, Buss also founded the less exclusive Camden School for Girls in 1871.

Molly was eager to earn her living by teaching, so she took up one of the places at the first teacher-training college in Cambridge, gaining a BA degree. As Molly writes about this first keen, excited but inexperienced cohort, she conveys a sense of the buzz and excitement of the time. Along with Molly, the students are all keen to learn and to help each other with their practice and visits, and talk about the methods of education, including the new European ideas.

Growing up with four brothers had definitely helped Molly become a strong-minded, capable and enthusiastic young woman. At the age of twenty-five, she was invited to take on the role of teacher-educator at Bedford College, London. Her work there, based on all the discussions in Cambridge, led to the inclusion of the history and theory of education, childhood development, classroom practice and other subjects that formed the familiar curriculum in colleges of education during the 20th century.

An aside: Molly’s romping style, and the successful outcome of her story in A LONDON GIRL might have been bitter reading for my mother. Her father, an old soldier, refused to sign the form granting her a place at the local grammar school, possibly because of the cost of the uniform. Instead, she stayed on, up in the top floor of the local authority school, taking a typing course instead. Not so long after, she ha joined the WAAF, and was working as a typist at Bomber Command.

A LONDON HOME OF THE NINETIES, pub 1937.

This last book in the trilogy, is about Molly’s marriage to Arthur Hughes, a barrister, after a ten year engagement. Molly, of course, (pictured below) knew she had to give up her work on marriage, so much of this book is about the work of managing their home in Ladbroke Grove, the birth of their first beloved daughter, and later, the arrival of their three boys. After Arthur's early death, Molly returned to teaching, eventually becoming a schools inspector and writer, living in a cottage in Cuffley.

As a whole, the LONDON FAMILY trilogy is a touching and complex portrayal of late Victorian family life, and has more in common with the liveliness of Nesbitt’s fictional families than I had expected, as well as revealing societal norms and changes during and since this period. 

Copies of A London Child may also be available from Persephone Books, with the charming cover below, titled '1 Canonbury Park North, Islington' and drawn by Ann Usborne.

An additional oddment: the hardback book that arrived here unseen was, to my surprise, a deft example of late century thriftiness. Someone had taken the trouble of rebinding the soft, original and unused Oxford paperback of A LONDON FAMILY, creating a sturdy cloth-covered hardback instead.  The front and back covers of the original paperback, with all the illustration and lettering, had been smoothly secured to the grey cloth binding, though they did not have the charm of the Persephone image above. Somehow, the neat practicality of the new binding felt very appropriate for Molly's determined account of her life.


Penny Dolan.

Shoemakers' Museum: in Street, Somerset by Sue Purkiss

Street is probably best known these days for its cut-price 'shopping village'. Busloads of people come from miles away and leave laden with shopping bags full of bargains from Next, Superdry, M&S, Ecco, Le Creuset, and heaven knows where else.

But for two hundred years it was famous for being the home of Clarks shoes. Remember the sandals we used to wear as children? The desert boots we wore when we grew up? Yes, those - and many other iconic items of footwear. Of course, Clarks shoes still exist and are doing very nicely thank you - but like so many other things, they are no longer made in the UK, though the company's headquarters are still here.

And now there is a museum  - Shoemakers Museum. I went along expecting to see those red sandals and to find out more about the history of shoemaking - but in fact, this rather lovely museum is about much more than shoes: it's very much about the Quaker family which founded the company. A notice early on tells us that: Quakers were committed to equality, integrity and peace. They work for a fairer and more sustainable world. It's more than a faith, it's a way of life. The Quaker beliefs and social networks of the Clark family inspired their work for abolition, suffrage, social justice and refuge. Their values influenced how they ran their business, treated their workers and supported their Somerset community. Quakers believed that God could be found anywhere, not just in a church, and they were consequently perceived to be radicals. They were banned from attending university till 1871, so many of them pursued business careers instead.

This was the case with the two brothers who founded the company, Cyrus and James Clark, about two hundred years ago. They came from a Quaker farming family in Street, which was then a small village. Cyrus had a sheepskin rug business. James had the idea - so simple, but so good! - of using the sheepskin offcuts to make slippers, and he commissioned skilled shoemaker Esau Whitnell to design and make the earliest pairs. At that time, shoes were not made in factories, but by outworkers at home. And so it began.

Those first slippers!

The company quickly became successful, eventually having many other factories both in the UK and abroad - the ground floor of the museum tells the story of the company's expansion. There's an endearing film in which several former workers recall what it was like to work for Clarks. All of them say it was like a family. There were social clubs, and on Fridays, one says, everyone went over the road to the pub. There were disputes, of course. People were paid by piecework, and some got a bit carried away and tried to snaffle the lion's share of work - these were called 'grabbers'. But by and large, it really does sound as if Clarks was a very good place to work. Certainly, when all the UK factories eventually closed towards the end of the 20th century, their employees - many of whom had worked for Clarks their whole lives - felt bereft. But the company couldn't fight the way the world was changing, with globalisation meaning that it was much cheaper to produce shoes in the far east. 

Workers in the canteen.

Where the lower floor tells the story of the family, and also of how shoe manufacturing developed, and of the people who made the shoes, the upper floor is devoted to the shoes themselves.

That iconic red sandal - and the Happy Shoe Company.

Marketing posters

The Clarks family are no longer at the helm of the company they founded. But there's no denying the lasting influence they have had on Street. Concerned for the health and well-being of their workers, they funded the building of houses, a library, and an open-air swimming pool which is still used today. Although the factories have closed now - all manufacturing is now done abroad - the shopping village mentioned earlier was built on their land and bears their name, and provides employment for many local people. You can also find out in the museum about how many of the family members absolutely tried to live their lives in accordance with those Quaker ideals.  They were actively against slavery and in support of votes for women, and they welcomed and housed persecuted people from all over the world.

Display indicating how the whole town developed round the shoe-making business.

And there's another, unexpected facet to the museum. A distant cousin of Cyrus and James, Alfred Gillett (1814-1904), moved to Street from Yeovil, where he had been an ironmonger, in the 1870s. He was a skilled and enthusiastic fossil collector. There were at the time a number of quarries in Street, from which blue lias stone was extracted - it was used in many buildings in the town, including the one in which the museum is housed. Alfred discovered some extraordinary fossils of ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, and these are now displayed in a gallery in the museum, where there's also a display devoted to Mary Anning, the Victorian fossil collector from Lyme Regis.

The museum consists of a modern extension sympathetically added to an old building, Abbey Grange, which was bought by the Clarks in 1890, and used for a variety of purposes - including at one time as a home for refugees. It sits in a large green space with an old orchard and mature trees; the museum only opened last year, but I suspect that eventually this space will become a garden. It's a tranquil counterpoint to - or refuge from! - the shopping village next door. 

It's a well-designed building, spacious and pleasant to wander round. And it tells you much more more than you might expect, as all the best museums do.

Into the backwoods: Catherine Parr Traill and the art of pioneer survival

by Stephanie Williams

I spent a lot of time in remote timber cabins in the Canadian backwoods as a child. No electricity, no running water — we drew it from the lake at one end of the property, and did our washing at the other, taking care to swim out a good distance to rinse the soap from our hair. An outhouse stood in the woods about 50 yards from the house, and early one morning I met a bear on the path as I went out to do my business. I can't remember what I did — shout? wave my arms? — but he bolted off as soon as I spotted him.

Like so many Canadians, my family came to the country as pioneers. The wilds had been our home. Led by my great-great-great-grandfather, 62-year-old Thomas Benson, three generations of my family migrated in 1837 from a farm called Cinderbarrow, high on a hill overlooking a valley in Cumbria. 

Cinderbarrow Farm today

A house was raised with the help of all the neighbours gathered together in a raising ‘bee’; likewise whenever a big task was undertaken by surrounding pioneers, people gathered to help in logging ‘bees’, husking ‘bees’, chopping ‘bees’ and quilting ‘bees’. The work, and the meals they shared, bound the community together.

A log cabin consisted of logs stacked one on top of the other, notched at the ends to fit them together, the gaps between filled with plaster or lichens to keep out wind and rain. The rafters were covered with shingles, the floor was earth; a clay and stone chimney rose above an open hearth. It was makeshift and crude, but it was shelter. Gradually the cabin was extended to include a root cellar, a dairy, barns and outhouses. Tables, chairs, beds, buckets and pails were made by hand from surrounding timber. 

The isolation of the bush

This was a time when such roads as existed were no more than wide breaks chopped through thick, brooding forest, curiously silent of wildlife. To go to town for supplies took a ponderous day each way: bringing in basic stores of salt, flour and sugar, needles, thread, and the essentials of hardware. The Mississaugas lived nearby — my grandmother remembered her mother setting out a couple of loaves of newly baked bread on a chopping block for them to take. Mosquitoes, black fly, illnesses and accidents; forest fires triggered by the extreme heat of summer, hurricanes, and the huge snows and freezing temperatures of winter — all were everyday hazards. It was a hard, hard life.

How much choice did a woman have if her husband was bent on becoming a settler? Catharine Parr Traill (1802–1899) left the gentle landscapes of Suffolk near Southwold for Canada in 1832 — five years before my family. Newly married, her husband was tempted by a grant of land he could claim as a serving army officer. Her younger brother, Samuel, had already emigrated in the 1820s. Catherine and her husband Thomas settled on a small land claim. They cleared the land and built their cabin. There she bore nine children.

Brought up short against the harsh realities of the Canadian bush, the terrible isolation from friends and family and the security of knowledge of her home country, it took no time for Traill to realise that if she and her family were to survive, it was up to her to feed and clothe them from the fruits of what first appeared a barren land. However prepared she was, she needed every ounce of ingenuity, resourcefulness, and expediency.

A writer in Upper Canada

Catherine Parr Traill - author and settler

Traill was also unusual: she, and four of her five sisters, were writers. She published her first book, a collection of children’s stories, at the age of 15, in 1818. Her younger sister Susanna Moodie — who followed her to Canada a few years later, was the author of Roughing It in the Bush. Her older sisters Agnes and Elizabeth later became so famous for their Lives of the Queens of England in 1840, that contemporaries compared the women to the Brontes and the Trollopes. Together, Traill, Moodie and Anne Langton, who wrote A Gentlewoman in Upper Canada, were the few female chroniclers of pioneering life in Canada. 

Catherine's book The Backwoods of Canada, published in 1836, would almost certainly have been read by my family, who happened to follow the Traills to the same small area of southern Ontario, near Rice Lake and the Otonabee River (in Ojibwa the ‘river that beats like a heart’). But even more important to the Canadian pioneer woman was her Canadian Settler's Guide, first published in 1855, a step-by-step account of how to make a home in the bush. It predated Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management by six years.

Here Traill provides guidance on every aspect of a woman’s role in pioneer life: the house and the garden, providing food and clothing for the family. Keeping cows and sustaining them through ferocious winters — "where roots, such as good sound turnips, cannot be had, a quart of boiled oats, morning and night, will keep a cow in good order".  Cooking, curing, making butter and cheese; refashioning clothes and shoes, knitting, weaving, dyeing — “one of the settler's great objects is to make as little outlay of money as possible”.  Everything in the household was done by the hands of the family; boys would wittle axe handles; girls as young as six were knitting socks.

Nothing was to go to waste

Men and boys were to take care of the heavy work – felling trees, clearing rocks, building, plowing, hunting, fishing, curing skins and fashioning brooms, axe handles, furniture. A passionate botanist – she would later write Canadian Wild Flowers and Studies of Plant Life in Canada -- her advice on gardening in the wilds, planting orchards, grafting trees and identifying strange plants and fruits was invaluable.

We are instructed in detail on how to churn butter and make cream in the challenging alternating temperatures of baking summer and freezing winter; on drying and smoking fish; on making essence of beef for sick persons; and on the best substitutes for tea and coffee — hemlock tea, brewed from the branches of the tree, and coffee (which makes you go to sleep!) made from the roots of dandelions. For more coffee: “The acorns of the white oak, browned and ground are also used”. On making tallow candles from rendered beef or mutton fat, and soap from the clean ashes of hardwood and grease from the entrails of hog. Nothing was to go to waste.

Feathers plucked from wild ducks and geese were saved for pillows. Hams were salted, fruit preserved, jams and jellies made, herbs dried. Hops and potatoes were turned into yeast, and from that yeast came half a dozen kinds of breads and cakes — biscuits, crackers, loaves. "Indian rice”, which grows in vast beds in still water and is harvested in September, had to be well dried, soaked and boiled before it revealed itself as white. Indian corn was ground and baked.

From the dairy to the dye pot

Economic hints and practical ways of making a living thread through her writing. Old clothing was cut down and refashioned or torn into strips to make rag carpets. Wool from sheep was carded, spun and dyed: white wool and black woven together to make grey; the outer skins of onions boiled to yield a soft brown or fawn; the flowers of goldenrod for yellow; butternut for a strong coffee brown; the lye of wood ashes and copperas (ferrous sulphate) for a yellow buff or orange. Spinning was done on great wheels, the spinner walking back and forth, guiding the yarn with one hand while turning the wheel with the other. My great-grandfather was out of school and ploughing fields at eleven.

Whole sections of the book are devoted to raising potatoes (along with turnips, essential staples for feeding animals as well as humans through the winter), and tapping the sap of maple trees to boil up into syrup and maple sugar.

Boiling sap to make maple sugar

Basic illnesses are covered. Ague – brought on near swamps and cleared land – was in fact malaria, repeatedly recurring, treated with quinine. Dysentery killed two of Catherine’s children; she saved a third by dosing it with extract from the root of American spikenard, Aralia racemosa – a cure probably handed to early settlers by the Mississaugas. In lonely places, she writes, where the aid of a medical man is difficult to be obtained, even severe wounds are healed, and simple fractures are reduced by the inhabitants themselves. Someone among them who has more nerve or more judgement than the rest is consulted upon such occasions and faith goes a great way with many patients in affecting cure.

Women -- yes, weak women and children

Forest fires were a frequent hazard. Sometimes people are exposed to considerable peril in new clearing from the running of fire in the woods… in such case where there is no near supply of water much can be affected by beating out the advancing flames and still more by opening the Earth with hoes and spade or better still by men yoking up the cattle and ploughing a few farrows to interpose the new earth between the advancing fire and the combustible matter. Women, yes, weak women and children, have battled against a wall of advancing flame and with hoes and other instruments have kept it back until help could be obtained.

In these days, when the upheavals of global politics crowd the headlines, my thoughts often turn to the grave threats that have been pushed aside: climate change, the future of energy and water, population movements, and the fragility of food supply. Catharine Parr Traill arrived in the wilderness as an English gentlewoman. Thomas was not a successful backwoodsman. She fell back on her skills as a writer to support the family -- and to record their life with clarity and without self-pity. 

To read her is to understand not only how Canada was built, but what it truly costs to begin again from nothing.

Stephanie Williams is a historian and writer who lives in north London. Her latest book, telling the story of her four years as a Canadian, convent-educated girl, at an elite American women's college is The Education of Girls -- coming of age in 4 years that changed America, 1966-1970.

‘A rich and stirring history of a moment when everything was changing for women in higher education.' Hillary Rodham Clinton

The Grand Egyptian Museum and Other Adventures in Egypt ~ by Lesley Downer

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.’

Ramses II at Luxor -
Ozymandias, King of Kings

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818

The Grand Egyptian Museum opened to huge fanfare on November 1st 2025. So when I planned a visit to Egypt in January, the first thing I did was book a ticket.

The museum is a long way from the centre of Cairo, on the edge of the Sahara, near the Pyramids and the Sphinx. It’s mammoth, designed to echo the pyramids, with sloping triangular walls and hieroglyphic decorations. Just getting from the gate to the entrance of the building is a long walk.

Once inside, the sheer size is breathtaking. The building soars above you. It’s the largest collection in the world of archaeological treasures devoted to a single civilisation.

Ramses dominates the atrium
of the Grand Egyptian Museum

Ramses II
The ground floor is dominated by an 11 metre (36 feet) tall statue of Ramses II (1303 - 1213 BCE), which is 3200 years old. The greatest and most powerful of all the pharaohs, Ramses fought wars, expanded his kingdom and commissioned colossal awe-inspiring statues of himself right across Egypt, including four vast statues at Abu Simbel - though even he might not have imagined that people would still pay homage to him three millennia later or that he would be immortalised by Percy Bysshe Shelley under the Greek form of his name, Ozymandias.

Having paid my respects to Ramses, I set off to explore the museum. Broad steps lead up to the exhibition halls on the third floor, on which sit or stand monumental, exquisitely-carved statues. The mammoth images of pharaohs and gods dwarf us mere humans who climb up. From the top you can see the pyramids shimmering in the desert.

Sneferu - battered but
amazingly ancient

There are twenty galleries on the third floor, arranged by era. They trace the history of ancient Egypt beginning with hunter gatherers and the earliest dynasties, around the 27th century BCE, right through to the advent of Greek and Roman influences in the early centuries CE.

One of the earliest artefacts is a battered but marvellous statue of Sneferu (2700 - 2200 BCE), which dates from 2600 BCE. A pioneer of pyramid building, he commissioned four pyramids including the Bent pyramid, whose bulging walls make it look a bit like a yurt.

Gallery after gallery is filled with amazing sculptures of gods and pharaohs, priests and scribes, many adorned with hieroglyphs. There are perfectly crafted models of boats and houses along with models of servants that would have been placed in tombs so that the dead could continue to enjoy the pleasures of this world, and which create a feeling for what the life of those ancient times was like. There’s also an absorbing section recreating the interior of some of the key tombs in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor.

On the way down one can take in the Tutankhamen Galleries and the Khufu Boat Galleries.

Shimmering in the desert - 
Pyramids and sphinx

It’s wonderful that these artefacts, this precious heritage of mankind, have been gathered together and carefully conserved and preserved. Most are perfect, intact and largely undamaged. It’s amazing that despite grave robbers and looters and British and French armies carting stuff away by the shipload there’s still so much right here in Egypt. It’s reason to celebrate and a good reason to visit Egypt. The Egyptian authorities are trying to reclaim treasures from Britain and France - such as the Rosetta Stone.

The museum is a marvellous showcase for these astonishing creations - the size of them, the beauty. It’s also a taster. After all, this was a living culture. These are objects that living people admired or worshipped or stood in awe before. And here in Egypt we can see artefacts like these in the actual temples in which they were intended to be seen, where they belong.

Pyramids and Sphinx
So you step out of the cool architect-designed museum into the blazing sun and the mad chaos of the Egyptian streets and take an Uber (the best method) through the honking surging Giza traffic to the pyramids.

I first visited in 1997. In those days you just went. Now you need a ticket. There’s a shuttle bus to take you from one to the next, and a lot of people.

 

The temple at Luxor

But no matter how many crowds there are, nothing can detract from their majesty and mystery, the sheer age and solidity and symmetry and size of them and the vastness of the desert that stretches behind. The Great Pyramid is 4600 years old. It’s of a physical scale that defies human comprehension and a time scale beyond imagination.

The Sphinx is if anything even more alluring and mysterious. It was probably commissioned by Khufu between 2590 and 2566 BCE, around the same time as the Great Pyramid, and the face is his. There is a stele between the paws, placed there by Pharaoh Tuthmose IV 1200 years later, in 1401 BCE. On it he records his dream, in which the sphinx asked him to clear away the sand that half concealed it after all those centuries and promised that if he did, he would become pharaoh. The gap of time between the sphinx and Thutmose is longer than between us and 1066.

The Temple at Luxor: Apotheosis of Ramses II
To set these ancient images more in their context you need to take a felucca down the Nile to the small palm-fringed town of Luxor. The temple at Luxor is breath-takingly beautiful. It was founded and laid out by Amenophis III (1417 - 1379 BCE) on the edge of the Nile. It’s a perfect, quite compact structure, with courts lined with towering pillars inscribed with hieroglyphs.

The Nile at Luxor

The temple reached its pinnacle of perfection under the great conqueror Ramses II - Ozymandias himself - a hundred years after Thutmose. The statue of Ramses II here is colossal yet delicate at the same time, and epic in scale. It conveys awesome power and divinity.

Of course all that power - and all that divinity - has long since vanished, leaving behind only magnificent monuments for us lesser mortals to contemplate:

‘Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

PS You can also see Ramses at Battersea Power Station! What would he have thought of that!

Photo of colossal statue of Ramses at Grand Egyptian Museum by Richard Mortel, originally posted on Flickr at https://flickr.com/photos/43714545@N06/54298959040 via Wikimedia Commons.

Portrait of Sneferu at Cairo Museum by Richard Mortel, originally posted on Flickr at https://www.flickr.com/photos/prof_richard/54297653082/ via Wikimedia Commons. 

The other photos are mine. 

Lesley Downer is a lover of ancient times and foreign places. She had two books out in 2024: The Shortest History of Japan (Old Street Publications) - 16,500 years of Japanese history in 50,000 words, full of stories and colourful characters - and her first ‘real’ book, On the Narrow Road to the Deep North, reissued by Eland under her new pen name to acknowledge her Chinese roots - Lesley Chan Downer. Since then she has been enjoying seeing places that are not Japan. Back to Japan soon! 

For more see www.lesleydowner.com