Museum Collections

Admission and opening times

Admission is free of charge but donations are welcome. The museum collections can be visited by appointment on the first Monday of each month, and at other times by arrangement. The Society participates in the annual London Open House programme in September.

Enquiries about the collections and appointments to view them can be made with the Collections Manager. Please telephone 0207 479 7088 or email: museum@sal.org.uk

Access and facilities

The ground floor rooms are suitable for wheelchair access. Access to parts of the museum and library collections is limited, but staff assistance is available.

There are toilets on the ground floor.

Due to its central location at Burlington House, the Society of Antiquaries is close to a number of cafes and restaurants in Piccadilly, not to mention the refreshments at the Royal Academy.

No parking is available on site.

How to get here

We are in the main courtyard of Burlington House and the nearest tube stations are Green Park and Piccadilly Circus.

Donations

Before the middle of the nineteenth century the Society was often seen by Fellows as the most appropriate place to deposit British antiquities and historical documents and pictures. The British Museum only started collecting British antiquities (as distinct from classical) antiquities officially with the acquisition in 1856 of the collection of London finds built up by Charles Roach Smith, FSA. The National Portrait Gallery was founded that same year and county record offices were not established until the twentieth century. The Society of Antiquaries of London was therefore the only institution willing to accept the many and varied donations made by Fellows of such objects as a Bronze Age shield from Scotland, a Thomas Becket casket from about 1200, illuminated manuscripts and unique broadsides relating to the seventeenth century Virginia Company. An outstanding group of early royal portraits was also bequeathed to the Society by Thomas Kerrich.

Purchases

The Society has also purchased from its own funds two important collections of drawings previously belonging to John Talman and Edward Harley, as well as paintings such as that of Old St. Paul’s. Key manuscript sources for British history such as the twelfth century Winton Domesday and the mid sixteenth century Inventory of Henry VIII were bought at auction, although it was nearly two hundred years before transcripts of them were published.

Commissioned work

The Society’s also made a notable contribution towards the understanding of British medieval art and architecture by commissioning record drawings of medieval buildings, and artists of the calibre of George Vertue and John Carter were appointed as draughtsmen to undertake this work. The thirteenth- century murals at the Palace of Westminster and the sixteenth-century murals at Cowdray House, Sussex were recorded and published by the Society and are the only detailed record of these decorative schemes as both buildings were later destroyed by fire. Drawings of items in Fellows’ collections were exhibited at meetings; one was of a ring said to have been given by Mary Queen of Scots to an ancestor of Lord Mansfield. This can no longer be traced. Drawings were commissioned for publication such as those of the Ribchester helmet, now in the British Museum. Objects were displayed and passed around a long table for members to discuss; a practice caricatured by Cruikshank in his satirical print The Antiquarian Society.

BADA article

A more detailed account of the Society's history and collections was published in the BADA Handbook 2007/8, published for the BADA Antiques and Fine Art Fair. A copy of that article (PDF file, 1.8MB), complete with illustrations, can be read of downloaded from here.