‘Crude Hints Towards an History of my House in L[incoln's] I[nn]Fields': 1 Occupying Ruin

The Museum is the colossal mirror in which man finally contemplates himself, in short, in all his aspects, finds himself literally admirable and abandons himself to the ecstasy expressed in all the art journals. This chapter considers two seemingly disparate museums: Sir John Soane's nineteenth-century London house crammed with books, paintings, fake archaeological relics, architectural drawings and models and the ephemera of daily life such as lottery tickets; and the Kodja Place Visitor and Interpretive Centre, filled with reflections on the past and fuelled by the community's collective hopes for the future. In 1812, Soane's own manuscript, a fiction entitled 'Crude Hints Towards an History of My House' was written from the point of view of an imagined future in which a fictional narrator contemplated the ruin of Soane's house and speculated on its creator and his creation. Both Soane and the Kojonup Community created fictions that served the construction of their myths in a number of ways.