Madame Tussauds: Wax, Revolution and Fire
Why is it significant?
The long queue in front of you and the green copper dome above it mark one of London's oldest crowd-pullers: Madame Tussauds.
Key Facts
| Place | Madame Tussauds: Wax, Revolution and Fire |
|---|---|
| Address | Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LR, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.52290, -0.15490 |
| Part of Walk | From 221B to Wimpole Street: Sherlock Holmes, Dickens and the Beatles in Marylebone, London |
| Generated | Generated |
The long queue in front of you and the green copper dome above it mark one of London's oldest crowd-pullers: Madame Tussauds. The dome once belonged to the London Planetarium, which opened next door in 1958, where generations of schoolchildren lay back in the dark and watched the stars wheel overhead.
The founder's story is darker than her waxworks. Marie Grosholtz learned to model wax in Paris from the physician Philippe Curtius. During the French Revolution, according to her own memoirs, she was made to take death masks from freshly guillotined heads, among them, she said, those of Louis the Sixteenth and Marie Antoinette. How much of that she embroidered later, nobody can be sure... but she understood that a story sells tickets.
She married François Tussaud, and in 1802 she crossed to Britain with her exhibition and one of her young sons. War between Britain and France broke out again, and she never went home. For about thirty years she toured the towns of Britain and Ireland with her figures in carts, before settling in 1835 at the Baker Street Bazaar, just around the corner. She died in 1850, and in 1884 her grandsons moved the exhibition to this site on Marylebone Road.
Disaster struck twice. In 1925 a fire destroyed much of the collection, though many of the original moulds were saved, and in 1940 a German bomb fell on the building during the Blitz. Each time the heads were remade, and the queue came back. Today the figures change with every new celebrity, but the trick is the one Marie learned in Paris: make people believe they have met someone.
The Chamber of Horrors, with its murderers and gallows, was for over a century the part everyone pretended not to want to see. Now continue east along Marylebone Road, past the traffic, to the great church with a tall portico and a tower ringed with golden figures.