Revamped, renamed Museum of the Home has a hell of a challenge if it wants to represent us all

What’s in a name? An awful lot when it’s the name of a former slave trader, regardless of the extent to which he might have contributed in other ways to his local community. So it’s small surprise that the Geffrye Museum, dedicated to the history of domestic spaces, no longer calls itself after Sir Robert Geffrye, a British merchant who invested in transatlantic slavery, and who left money in his will in 1703 to found the 12 almshouses in Shoreditch that have housed the museum since 1914. Following a three year, £18 million renovation that has opened up a new basement gallery space and created a welcoming new entrance, this east London gem is now called The Museum of the Home.

Inside, the revamp is chiefly designed to provide a more diverse understanding of what we mean by the word “home”, in tandem with the museum’s key exhibit, Rooms Through Time, a series of reconstructed parlour rooms first created in 1934 to show the changing domestic habits of the London middle classes from the 1600s to the present day.

Thankfully these brilliantly evocative, informative rooms have been retained, but in keeping with today’s hyperventilating sensitivity, the captions have been refreshed, notably to remind visitors of the apparently unremittingly pernicious historic reach of the East India Company on middle class lifestyles. There seems not a single coffee cup or punch bowl on display that is not now accompanied by a knuckle rapping text reminding us of the link between coffee, tea and spices and the evils of colonialism and the slave trade. Such links are crucial tools of understanding, of course, but this sort of simplistic virtue signalling feels perversely glib. Why not mount a scholarly side exhibition to provide a more thoroughly contextualised history of the East India Company instead?

Elsewhere, in its efforts to diversify the stories of our domestic history, the museum sometimes ends up befuddling more than it illuminates. In the former chapel, as though to atone for the Geffrye statue that remains there in keeping with the government’s “retain and explain” policy – there is now a 21-minute video about a modern-day young black female Hackney resident who identifies with a Jamaican wet nurse who came to the almshouses in the 1800s. It’s ambitious but quite obscure, and fails to connect in any meaningful sense with the displays that surround it.

Meanwhile, in the new exhibition space downstairs, the emphasis is firmly on personal testimony. A series of photographs depict different people’s houses: Jake’s is a draughty semi derelict east London warehouse; Harry’s is the house his family has lived in for five generations. A letter written by the rookie solicitor Thomas Adams to his mum in 1759 informs her that his “very snug” room contains “very good drawers” for his linen.

Another room explores sentimental attachment to objects, from mantle clocks to plastic cassette holders. There are reminders, too, of what home means to those who don’t have one: a coffin bed for a poor wretch in Whitechapel in the 1800s, a small locked box for a servant girl, the despair felt by a present day homeless teenager.

These are tantalising stories, but often they feel half told, even gestural, and rarely embedded within the historical moment in which they live. Furthermore, the layout feels ad hoc: a photographic display of elderly Hackney residents tending gardens and a sound installation exploring the hidden lives of servants voiced by Maxine Peake are scattered amid partial explorations of housework and women’s lib. It’s all a bit pick and mix.

I’m not knocking the new museum – the renovation, which floods the ground floor foyer with light and exposes the basements where the original residents would have stored their coal, opens up the building beautifully. Nor am I knocking the impulse to represent a more inclusive and lived experience of home (a new Room Through Time recreating the London living room of an Afro Caribbean family in the 1970s is particularly good: full of vibrant detail and scrupulously culturally specific) because the museum feels more alive and responsive as a result. But in opening up the name, you wonder if it has created a rod for itself, too. We all have a unique relationship with home. The museum has one hell of a challenge if it wants to represent them all.

The Museum of the Home opens tomorrow. Free but booking essential: museumofthehome.org