I spotted this Gradgrindian pediment while out and about on Open House Weekend. It crowns the eastern entrance to the Kirkaldy Testing Museum on Southwark Street—a formerly industrial area behind London’s Tate Modern gallery.
Now, London has many eccentric visitor attractions, from the fan museum in Greenwich to the museum of dog collars out in Kent. In most cases, it’s pretty obvious what you’re going to see inside. But the Kirkaldy Testing Museum? Who was Kirkaldy? What was he testing? And how do you form a museum around an ambiguous verb?
I stepped inside to find out.
‘Testing’, it seems, refers to the process of testing construction materials such as iron and steel. And ‘Kirkaldy’ was David Kirkaldy (1820–1897), a Scottish (naturally) engineer who used his own money to set up the testing works in Southwark in 1865.
The building contains a testing machine of Kirkaldy’s own design—basically, a huge vice that can measure the strength of materials in compression, tension and torsion. It’s a monster, weighing 150 tons and filling the ground floor of the museum. Almost 150 years after its construction, the machine is still in perfect working order thanks to a team of passionate volunteers who maintain it. They demonstrate the device once a month to a trickle of visitors and must have been a little overwhelmed at the torrent of interest that Open House weekend generated.
Alas, I didn’t get to see the machine in action. However, the chirpy engineers in the basement showed me core samples from the Brunel Thames tunnel and Crossness pumping station, and a bronze head from Leadenhall. Surely this must be one of the most curious and obscure museums in London. I didn’t dare say so, though. That would have been an opinion in this house of facts.
The Kirkaldy Testing Museum is indeed so obscure it doesn’t even have a web site. You can find it at 99 Southwark Street, a few streets behind the Tate Modern. It opens on the first Sunday of every month.
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Matt – that’s truly wonderful, though when you think of all the good things you could have a museum based around (where’s the Museum of Unicyling Girrafes when you want one?), it’s hard not to ask ‘Why????’
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“However, the chirpy engineers in the basement showed me core samples from the Brunel Thames tunnel and Crossness pumping station”
So it turned out to be a boring museum too, then?
https://www.instantrimshot.com/
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Oh dear, oh dear. Where’s my ‘user is banned’ button?
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Boring museum, huh? That’s nothing. Here’s a genuine entry from Yellow Pages showing that the epithet has been applied to a whole profession:
Yellow Pages Speaks Hosted by Flickr
… they have removed the entry now, but it was there for a number of years.
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Of course Cambridge University used to have a Small Bore Club.