The Good Room The front parlour, kept for best, 1952

Every house on Tenter Lane had a front room kept for best. The Merrins’ was opened for weddings, funerals, the vicar, and in June 1953 for the Coronation, when twenty-two neighbours watched a rented television on the sideboard.

The Good Room rebuilds the parlour as it was that summer, from the photographs in the archive and the furniture in store: the tiled fireplace, the china cabinet, the wireless, and the antimacassars Ada crocheted to keep hair oil off the chairs.

Why a room nobody used

A parlour tells you what a family wanted to be seen to own. Almost everything in it is in better condition than anything else in the house, because it was hardly touched. That makes it the opposite of Made to Mend, and we planned the two exhibitions as a pair.