Department
One object at a time. The antiques, instruments and souvenirs people actually held in their hands, and what those things tell us about them.
On the front of the Corn Exchange in Bristol there's a clock with an extra minute hand, set about ten minutes apart from the other. It's a fossil from the time before time was standardised, when every town ran on its own clock and that was completely sensible.
Eighteenth-century tourists walked to the best viewpoint in the Lake District, turned round, and looked at it in a small dark mirror. Meet the Claude glass, the phone screen of the 1770s.