Hello and welcome to the fourth and final episode in this series of close readings, looking at how history changed in the romantic period.

I'm Rosemary Hill. I'm a contributing editor at the LRB, and I'm extremely pleased to be

joined this week by Neil McGregor, former director of the National Gallery, the British Museum,

and most recently the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, whose latest radio series, the museums that make

us, is currently running on BBC Radio 4. Hello, Neil. Hello, Rosemary. Well, last time I talked

to Rory Sweet about the Bayer Tapestry and the tireless work of antiquaries in the late 18th, early 19th centuries,

studying the objects of the past and reimagining

how we think about our history. And this week, Neil and I are going to go to the scene of the

event which could be described as the determining moment in romantic history and which we

haven't really talked about yet in this series, the Battle of Waterloo. It became a tourist destination, even as the

smoke of war still hung in the air, and its material relics soon found their way into antique shops

and private collections and became part of that circulation of antiquities that led to the

establishment of the modern museum, the kind of museums that we recognise today.

After Waterloo, there was all this stuff which people were acquiring all the way across Europe.

And it's the beginning of what we now think of as architectural salvage.

And Wardour Street in Soho became the area where, I mean, not interestingly very far from the British Museum,

which at that stage had no British antiquities, became the sort of the classic place for getting your knocked off or knocked up antiquities.

It does become a huge trade, doesn't it?

Not just because of the revolutionary armies,

but because of the secularisation of so many of the religious houses

right across Europe, this enormous volume of objects,

sacred and profane, panelling, textiles, all of which suddenly arrives, often with no proper provenance at all.

...