‘Housing the Collection: The Great Windmill Street Anatomy Theatre and Museum’, in William Hunter and the Art and Science of Eighteenth-Century Collecting, Ashgate (Histories of Material Culture and Collecting 1700-1900)
Year of Publication: 2013

This essay describes the original house and collection of the eminent Scottish anatomist, Dr William Hunter 1718-1783 and explains how the Great Windmill Street Anatomy Theatre and Museum connected Hunter’s ambitions for his collection, an accumulation and combinability of natural and artificial curiosities, with the ambitious plans of ‘improvement’ for the city itself. Hunter’s ‘great school’ incorporated details of the urban architectural schemes of John Gwynn in his London and Westminster Improved (1766) and constituted an exemplar of the public/private spaces characteristic of late eighteenth-century London.