We are very pleased to announce that the Brunel Museum has been awarded the Costume Society’s Daphne Bullard Grant 2024. We are very grateful to the Costume Society, who previously supported the Museum in 2022 with an Elizabeth Hammond Grant, to enable conservation work on a Thames Tunnel kerchief. Without their continued support, much of this work to protect and discover these objects would have been impossible.
The grant will be used to shine a light on a largely unexplored object in our collection, a pair of late 18th century paste glass buckles which once belonged to Marc Isambard Brunel. The project will include two elements: the conservation of the buckles, and further research into them by a student dress historian. The grant has been awarded for the conservation of Brunel’s buckles.
We are interested in these buckles because they emphasise a different image of the Brunels, less directly connected to their industrial work. I.K. Brunel self-fashioned with his distinctive stovepipe hat; but so too did other members of his family, with more luxurious and unusual items such as these buckles.
They will also form a route into discussing Brunel’s boot-making for Wellington’s army in the early 1810s, and the clothing, including footwear, provided by Brunel for Thames Tunnel miners. Early research into the buckles opened up questions around whether these are in fact women’s buckles, and around the cultural and political relevance of shoe buckles during both the French Revolution, which Marc Brunel fled in 1793, and the end of the 1700s in Britain.
Finally, by the early 1800s, bejewelled buckles were deeply unfashionable. Their retention, repair, and reuse thus speaks to questions of sustainability, recycling and the rise of ‘fast fashion’, contemporary concerns with which the Museum engages in its work with the local community.
“Examining, stabilizing, and cleaning the buckles would offer significant impact in terms of display, collections care, and audience engagement. The buckles will form part of an entirely new display which will focus on the Brunels, drawing them into their sociopolitical context and examining their domestic lives in addition to their work.
Bejewelled buckles were designed for wear in candlelight, where flickering flames caught the gems to create dazzling effects. This project will make Brunel’s buckles literally and figuratively ‘sparkle’ in ways previously impossible,” said Katherine McAlpine, Director, The Brunel Museum.
For more on these buckles, do check out this video by Dr Jack Hayes, Collections Access Coordinator on our YouTube channel.
The conserved buckles will go on public display in 2025, as part of the Brunel Museum Reinvented Project. Sign up here for our newsletter to keep up to date!