Excellent backstamp
Have been working on a mosaic for South London Botanical Institute in Tulse Hill. The SLBI is wonderful, and undeservedly little known. It was set up a hundred years ago, by Allan Octavian Hume — a keen botanist, who wanted to make the study of plants accessible not only to the rich, but also to the working classes. The SLBI is housed in a charmingly scruffy and virtually untransformed Victorian building (beautiful tiles for the tile conscious.) It has a herbarium, a wonderful garden, and an extensive library of botanical books and journals.
The mosaic is commemorative, and although it is largely made in marble and smalti, I thought I would include a small proportion of ceramic in it. Members of the Institute donated broken tableware to the project, and amongst the donations was this fascinating backstamp. The plate was produced by Johnson Bros, to record a bouquet of flowers given to the Queen in a royal visit to Canada in 1939. Difficult to imagine a contemporary equivalent.
