‘Poor old Mornington Crescent, I feel sorry for it with this highly made-up neighbour blocking the view it had enjoyed,’ commiserated Professor C.H. Reilly in the Architects’ Journal in 1928. He was talking about the new reinforced-concrete Carreras cigarette factory designed by architects Marcus Evelyn and Owen Hyman Collins that had just gone up across from the station. It wasn’t the concrete that bothered him so much as the make-up: the gaudily painted façade with papyrus-form columns copied from the ancient Egyptian tomb of Panehsy and the two huge black cats representing the goddess Bast – while advertising Black Cat cigarettes – flanking the entrance.
How did this time-travelling lump of Egyptiana come to land in north London? It’s a long and very complicated story told in two fascinating exhibitions marking the anniversaries of the two great eureka moments in Egyptology – the decoding of hieroglyphs in 1822 and the rediscovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb a century later – both involving imperial conquest, bitter scholastic rivalries and appropriation on a humungous scale.
It was the Romans who began emptying Egypt of its pharaonic patrimony: to mark his conquest in 30 BC Octavian had a pair of obelisks carted off from Heliopolis and set up in Rome.
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