Not far from my parents’ grave in a London cemetery is a striking mausoleum in solid Egyptian style. Colonel Alexander Gordon, who died in 1911, is buried there. I looked him up. Like Colonels Parker and Sanders, the title was honorific, rather than a military rank; he lived much of his life in the US where he was an industrialist. In 1977 heavy metal band Judas Priest used his tomb on the cover of their album Sin after Sin. Howard Carter, the excavator of Tutankhamun, is incidentally buried nearby, his gravestone disappointingly plain.
If you walk down Piccadilly, just opposite Burlington Arcade you’ll find Egyptian House. It doesn’t look very Egyptian. But this was the site of the Egyptian Hall, a large, exotic exhibition space built in 1812 which showed, among other things, Napoleon’s captured coach, artefacts brought back by Captain Cook and Géricault’s “The Raft of the Medusa”.
When I was four, I remember standing in line with my dad for The Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum. That was probably London’s first blockbuster show, with queues stretching for blocks. Also in Bloomsbury is Nicholas Hawksmoor’s eccentric St George’s Church, its stepped spire somewhere between a mausoleum, a pyramid and an obelisk. Hawksmoor — “the devil’s architect” — was famously a freemason and a short stroll away you’ll find Freemason’s Hall with a stepped tower seemingly inspired by St George’s Church and an interior rich with Egyptian iconography. A few minutes’ walk from there is Sir John Soane’s Museum, London’s most remarkable house, with a basement anchored by the huge alabaster sarcophagus of Pharaoh Seti I, which the architect bought in 1824 after the ￡2,000 price tag proved too much for the British Museum.