This week on the Post we have public baths and washhouses and the immensely important role they played in people's lives in the C20 in tackling the problems of doing the washing and bathing, as discussed in Round About a Penny a Week (1913). Manchester's Victoria Baths opened in 1906 ("the most splendid municipal bathing institution in the country”) and offered tiered pricing for Males 1st Class, Males 2nd Class, and Females to swim or have a bath in extremely grand, ornate surroundings. 

The Museum of the Home's Rooms Through Time have always been and still are the main draw; the layout of the former almshouse allows the visitor to walk past four hundred years of changing domestic interiors. There are now several new rooms which bring the story up to date and beyond. This is 'A Terraced House in 2024'.

Vases and bowls of fresh flowers in our novels often feature in Persephone novels and tell the reader a great deal about the people who arrange them. Rhoda's arrangement in The New House is strikingly colourful and natural after the stuffiness of the dark, old Victorian house. "By choosing strange colours and putting them together, combining the vivid discords in a brilliant harmony, she expressed and satisfied a deep, unsatisfied longing for charm and colour...she carried the flowers in and put them one by one in the clouded bowl, lifted them and shook them gently, setting free their airy grace with a light touch, as though she shook loose a flock of butterflies into the air." This is Flowers (c1930-37) by Ruth Latter (1869-1949) in the Museum of the Home.

Although this is a room in Hampstead, it could just as easily be in 'Kelmscott',  Miss Porteous' home in The Village. Marghanita Laski, who did indeed live in Hampstead, is superb at creating rooms which reflect her characters' tastes, personalities and aspirations. Miss Porteous furnishes hers in a self-conscious William Morris-style, with chintz, repoussé brass, and wheelback chairs. The painting is View of a Domestic Interior (probably Church Row, Hampstead, c1913-28) by Ellen Dora Nicholson (1866-1946).

The Museum of the Home has a small but fine collection of paintings of domestic scenes, some of which are on display in the new basement galleries, for example The Burleigh Family Taking Tea at Wilbury Crescent, Hove (c1947) by Charles Burleigh (1869-1956). So much of what is in the museum connects to the books we publish; this could be an early scene in Someone at a Distance - including the all-important French windows. 

This week on the Post, it's The Museum of the Home, housed in the beautiful former Geffrye Almshouses (1714, Grade I listed) in Hoxton, seen here in a 1985 print by John Piper. It has recently had a significant makeover; in addition to its well-known sequence of domestic rooms through time, there are new galleries in the basement, lovely gardens, and a cafe in a former Victorian pub. Very much worth a visit, and easy to reach on the London Overground.

Rural harvest customs such as corn dollies survive thanks to writers and makers who celebrate folk and popular arts in the tradition of Barbara Jones, author of The Unsophisticated Arts (1951) and organiser of the influential Black Eyes & Lemonade exhibition at the Festival of Britain. One of the masters of the art-form was Fred Mizen from Great Bardfield who created a huge Lion and Unicorn for the Festival; he can be seen making a traditional corn dolly in a Pathé newsreel clip.