Es Devlin: Memory Palace review – her sprawling world history is a railway modeller's paradise

Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, London
The artist and theatre designer has created a vast, poetic sculptural map of world history that maps time not space, where Rosa Parks’ bus sits alongside the Buddha’s fig tree

The Georgian architect John Soane would have found a lot to enjoy in the curious artwork that stage and gig designer Es Devlin has created in his even more curious home. Soane started out as a bricklayer, went on to design Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Bank of England, and bequeathed Britain his delirious one-man museum on Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He also built the delightfully odd Pitzhanger Manor in west London where Devlin has installed an epic 3D map of world history.

Devlin’s Memory Palace is a railway modeller’s paradise. Using cut bamboo, she has created a capacious warped pale-grey landscape that curves all around you, covered in buildings and mountains and even the sacred fig tree under which Siddhartha sat. Her sprawling diorama is ordered chronologically not topographically – it’s a map of time, not space – so the Buddha’s tree is located near the Athenian Acropolis where, Devlin points out on a printed key, Socrates taught. Up near the ceiling are the pyramids of Giza, and in front of a skyscraper island stands the Statue of Liberty.

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