Royal Geographical Society: Livingstone and Shackleton on the Wall
Why is it significant?
On the corner of Exhibition Road, a cosy red-brick house with tall chimneys and curly Dutch gables looks as if it has wandered in from the countryside. Now look at the niches in its walls.
Key Facts
| Place | Royal Geographical Society: Livingstone and Shackleton on the Wall |
|---|---|
| Address | 1 Kensington Gore, London SW7 2AR, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.50130, -0.17530 |
| Part of Walk | Albertopolis: Prince Albert's London of Museums, Music and Science |
| Generated | Generated |
On the corner of Exhibition Road, a cosy red-brick house with tall chimneys and curly Dutch gables looks as if it has wandered in from the countryside. Now look at the niches in its walls. On the Kensington Gore side stands a man in a peaked cap; around the corner on Exhibition Road, another in heavy polar clothing. The first is David Livingstone. The second is Ernest Shackleton.
This is the home of the Royal Geographical Society, founded in 1830 to advance geographical science. The house, Lowther Lodge, was built in the 1870s by Richard Norman Shaw for the politician William Lowther, and the Society moved in in 1913. For more than a century, if you wanted to fill in a blank space on the map, this was the institution you needed on your side... for advice, instruments, sometimes money, and afterwards a packed lecture theatre in which to tell your story.
Livingstone was a Scottish missionary doctor who crossed southern Africa from coast to coast in the 1850s and then disappeared from European view while searching for the source of the Nile. In 1871 the journalist Henry Morton Stanley tracked him down at Ujiji, on Lake Tanganyika, and supposedly greeted him with four famous words: Dr Livingstone, I presume? Whether he really said it is still argued over. The pages of Stanley's diary covering that day were torn out.
Shackleton's story is wilder still. In 1915 his ship Endurance was crushed by pack ice in the Weddell Sea. He led his men across the ice, then sailed a small open boat, the James Caird, some thirteen hundred kilometres across the Southern Ocean to South Georgia, and crossed its unmapped mountains on foot to fetch help. Every man of the Endurance party came home alive. In March 2022 the wreck itself was found three kilometres down, astonishingly intact, its name still legible on the stern.
The Shackleton statue is by Charles Sargeant Jagger, a sculptor who had been wounded at Gallipoli and on the Western Front, and who knew something about endurance himself. Now walk back west along Kensington Gore, past the front steps of the enormous round hall, and stop where you can take in its whole curve.