Queen Consort Receives Piece of Her Own History While Nation Reflects on What That History Contains
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
By Isla Campbell | Central London | prat.uk/author/isla-campbell/
The Queen and the Fan and the Museum
Queen Camilla attended the opening of The Fan Museum’s new Monarchy exhibition in Greenwich, south-east London, in her capacity as patron of the institution, and received something rather extraordinary: the fan that was specially made for her official coronation portrait. The fan, which features the Queen’s favourite flowers and butterflies, was described by Camilla as “so beautiful” and as something she would use on “special occasions,” which is the kind of personal, specific response that makes royal engagements more interesting than their ceremonial framing suggests they should be. She was not performing delight. She appeared to be experiencing it.
The Fan Museum in Greenwich is one of London’s smaller specialist museums, dedicated to the history, conservation, and artistry of fans from around the world and across centuries. It is not the kind of institution that generates the footfall of the British Museum or the natural drama of the Natural History Museum’s whale skeleton. It is, however, genuinely extraordinary in its specificity: a collection that tells a history of decoration, craftsmanship, social signalling, and the specific ways that objects accumulate meaning through the occasions on which they are carried. Camilla’s coronation fan will join that collection of objects with layered meanings. It is, in context, exactly where it belongs.
The Monarchy Exhibition
The Fan Museum’s new Monarchy exhibition traces the history of fans associated with British royal occasions, creating a visual and material history of monarchy through one of its more intimate material objects. Fans carried at coronations, weddings, and state occasions; fans given as gifts between royal houses; fans that document the specific fashion and social codes of different royal eras. The exhibition is the kind of project that specialist museums do better than general ones: it tells a large story through a small, specific lens, and the specificity is what makes the large story visible.
Greenwich is undervisited relative to its historical significance. The London the Inside and Londonist have both covered Greenwich’s cultural institutions with the attention that an area with the National Maritime Museum, the Old Royal Naval College, the Prime Meridian, and the Cutty Sark deserves. The Fan Museum adds to a cluster of institutions that reward the journey across the river. Camilla’s visit generates coverage. The coverage might send some readers to Greenwich. Greenwich will not be disappointed to receive them.
What Camilla’s Public Role Has Become
Camilla’s path to Queen Consort — through the public controversy of the Charles and Diana years, through the gradual rehabilitation of public perception, through her marriage to Charles and then his accession — is a study in how public figures navigate situations that appear, at their worst moments, unrecoverable. She navigated it with the specific combination of public restraint and private continuity that eventually produced a version of her persona that is genuinely respected rather than merely tolerated. She is at 500 engagements a year. She is patron of institutions that matter. She received her coronation fan from the Fan Museum in Greenwich and said it was beautiful. This is the public life she has arrived at. It is considerably better than the alternative versions of the story could have produced. Happy Mother’s Day, Your Majesty.
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London continues to fascinate and frustrate in equal measure. The city’s ability to contain multitudes — the ancient and the brand-new, the absurdly expensive and the surprisingly accessible, the deeply traditional and the constantly self-reinventing — is what makes it inexhaustible as a subject. Every week produces new material: new events, new controversies, new moments of unexpected beauty or institutional comedy. The writers at The London Prat are paying attention to all of it, and this column attempts to add one small North London — or Central London, or Shoreditch, or tourist-facing — perspective to the larger conversation about what this city is and what it is becoming. The conversation is ongoing. London is always becoming. This is either its great charm or its great exhaustion, depending on the week and the weather and whether the tube is running. Happy reading, and do come back next week.
London continues to fascinate and frustrate in equal measure. The city’s ability to contain multitudes — the ancient and the brand-new, the absurdly expensive and the surprisingly accessible, the deeply traditional and the constantly self-reinventing — is what makes it inexhaustible as a subject. Every week produces new material: new events, new controversies, new moments of unexpected beauty or institutional comedy. The writers at The London Prat are paying attention to all of it, and this column attempts to add one small North London — or Central London, or Shoreditch, or tourist-facing — perspective to the larger conversation about what this city is and what it is becoming. The conversation is ongoing. London is always becoming. This is either its great charm or its great exhaustion, depending on the week and the weather and whether the tube is running. Happy reading, and do come back next week.
London continues to fascinate and frustrate in equal measure. The city’s ability to contain multitudes — the ancient and the brand-new, the absurdly expensive and the surprisingly accessible, the deeply traditional and the constantly self-reinventing — is what makes it inexhaustible as a subject. Every week produces new material: new events, new controversies, new moments of unexpected beauty or institutional comedy. The writers at The London Prat are paying attention to all of it, and this column attempts to add one small North London — or Central London, or Shoreditch, or tourist-facing — perspective to the larger conversation about what this city is and what it is becoming. The conversation is ongoing. London is always becoming. This is either its great charm or its great exhaustion, depending on the week and the weather and whether the tube is running. Happy reading, and do come back next week.
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