If you’re standing in the queue for the Science Museum on Exhibition Road you might spot this inscription above the large and imposing archway opposite:
SCIENCE AND ART DEPARTMENT
SCHOOLS ** MUSEUM
A.D. 1852
The date is misleading because the building – now the Henry Cole Wing of the Victoria and Albert Museum – was constructed between 1899 and 1909.
I was seven years old when I first joined the queue at the Science Museum (I can be sure of the date because I remember a poster for Kirk Douglas’s film ‘The Vikings’ – released in August 1958 – on hoardings around the Natural History Museum gardens).
The Royal College of Art
At that time there was an arts and crafts-style mosaic in the frame to the right of the archway. Several muses reclined elegantly beneath an inscription indicating that this was then the ‘Royal College of Art’.
I remember asking my mum what went on there and she explained that this was a place where people went to learn to draw and paint.
The concept of having the whole day devoted to drawing appealed to me enormously!
Fast forward to September 1972 and I was walking through that entrance to start a three-year course in the Illustration Department.
As you can see from this page from the ‘Royal College of Art Pocket Book 1972-73’, the original 1852 schools/museums concept was still in place with the various departments of the Royal College of Art clustered amongst the museums of South Kensington.
The Graphic Design and Painting Schools were linked directly to the V&A. There was a door at the end of the corridor beyond the illustration studio which opened onto a flight of stairs. Go down these stairs and you came out through an door on a corridor in the V&A.
I remember this as being in the drama department but my friend Pete Wane tells me that you’d find yourself in the Sculpture Gallery.
At some stage during our time in the illustration department this door was permanently closed because of an IRA bombing campaign which targeted London at that time.
Renunion
A couple of weeks ago, a few of us got together for first Royal College of Art Illustration Department reunion since we graduated 49 years ago this summer. We’re hoping to meet up for the 50th anniversary in June next year and hope that we can round up the remaining five from our year plus anyone from Illustration who graduated in 1974 or in 1976 who might like to join us.
If you would like to join us please get in touch, it would be great to hear from you.
Pete Wane joined us at the Polish Hearth, further up Exhibition Road, opposite Imperial College.
Nice article and many thanks for the tour of the school. Good photos of the group and they appear well.
Frank B
We all feel so lucky to have had the opportunity to be at the RCA. And we’re all still just as keen on our creative work.
Good Morning 7.35 am November
Just discovered your wonderful illustrations and diary . I was a painting student at RCA 72/75 and lived in Evelyn Gardens best wishes Richard Miller
Glad that you spotted that Richard. This weekend we’re off to a show by a painting student from the year above us, Roger Gardner, who’s got an exhibition at Halifax. He, his wife Sue and baby daughter Sarah lived in a slightly larger Evelyn Gardens room halfway up the stairs in number 14. Saw Sarah by the canal last week. Small world. I remember yours was a good year for the painting school – but I was in awe of the painters anyway, they seemed to have a lot of energy – probably the last group taken on by Carel Wight?