Last night my friend M. sent me this image:

It’s the cardboard diorama Simon Costin made for the Dickens and London exhibition at the Museum of London back in 2011 – and isn’t it lovely! I mean, the London of Dickens’ novels reimagined in cardboard…

You can see more pictures and read about Costin here on The Gentle Author’s Spitalfields Life blog.

I wish I’d known about this back in 2011. It must have been interesting*. But the diorama… ah, the diorama! Now my crafty side is all aflutter with wild notions of knives and scissors, and glue and sections of the Agas Map… I don’t have the time, and if I did, where would I put a big cardboard diorama? And yet I think I really want one little Elizabethan streets made of cardboard – the way I imagine it in my novel-in-progress. We’ll see – but, whatever happens, this is all your fault, M.

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* The MoL also commissioned The Houseless Shadow, by William Raban – a documentary film exploring “the continuities between London after dark as it is now, compared with how it was described by Charles Dickens over 150 years ago”.