BBC presenter to give guided tour of telegraphy exhibition

Archaeologist and TV presenter, Dr Cassie Newland, will swap the ‘Coast’ for transatlantic telegraph cables on Thursday 15th December to give visitors a free tour of a landmark telegraphy exhibition at City of London Corporation’s Guildhall Art Gallery.

Well-known for her roles in Channel 4’s ‘Time Team’, BBC 2’s ‘Coast’ and ‘The Genius of Invention’, Dr Newland is a historical archaeologist at the University of Bristol, and has curated many of the exhibition’s rare artefacts (on loan from the Archives at King’s College, London).

The ‘Victorians Decoded: Art and Telegraphy’ exhibition is a collaboration between Guildhall Art Gallery, King’s College London, The Courtauld Institute of Art and the Institute of Making at University College London which marks the 150th anniversary of the first transatlantic telegraph cable.

Visitors will enjoy intriguing tales of how the cable changed the world and transformed peoples’ understanding of time, space and speed of communication by allowing near-instantaneous communications across continents for the first time.

Exhibition highlights:
• Never-seen-before paintings by prominent Victorian artists and rare artefacts including telegraph cable samples, newspapers, maps, codebooks and telegraphic devices.
• Edwin Landseer’s renowned ‘Man Proposes, God Disposes’ (1848) painting of the last, thwarted journey of HMS Terror.
• A messaging machine designed by UCL and inspired by a Roald Dahl novel, which produces one-of-a-kind texts and enables visitors to create their own coded messages.

‘Victorians Decoded: Art and Telegraphy’ is open to the public until 22nd January 2017. The City of London Corporation, which owns and manages Guildhall Art Gallery, invests £80m every year in heritage and cultural activities of all kinds. It is the UK’s largest funder of culture after the government, the BBC, and the Heritage Lottery Fund.

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