Gladiator Exhibit at the Royal Armouries, Leeds

Half-term Holiday City Break to Leeds & the Royal Armouries.

Not Enough Museum Visits This Year!

We love museums but because it’s been a bit of a chaotic year this year we haven’t been visiting many out of town museums. So we made a special effort this school half-term and booked a hotel in Leeds (The Dakota, highly recommended) and tickets for The Royal Armoury’s Gladiator exhibit.

'See rare Roman artefacts from Pompeii and the Colosseum, discover the training, battle tactics, and fame of the ancient world's fiercest fighters. Get up close to amazingly well-preserved 2000-year-old helmets, plus get hands-on with realistic replicas. Explore a model of the Colosseum and discover how it was a reflection of Roman society.'

Link to the exhibition web page: Gladiators - Heroes of the Colosseum

As it turned out we picked a bad day to visit the armouries as they were hosting Leeds University degree ceremonies in their conference/theatre rooms and the museum was packed with both half-term families AND graduating students!

Still, Leeds Armoury is a huge building with several floors of exhibits so once we got past the crowds at the foyer and in a elevator to the upper floor where the gladiator exit was it was a little less busy. Just bear in mind that the Armouries is a prime attraction during school holidays for families - particularly because entry to the general exhibit is free!

[Getting there: Also make provision for travelling to the museum as it’s not quite in the centre of Leeds but across the river. It’s not that far - I even walked the journey back to the centre which only took us 20 minutes - but you might want to book a taxi OR there is even a water taxi stop which goes from the railway station to the museum!]

Above: Photographs from our 2014 visit to Rome and the Colosseum. A memorable holiday and so when the wife heard of the Gladiator exhibition she was very keen to visit the Royal Armouries in Leeds.

Up To The Forth Floor…Lots To See.

I mentioned elevators because it’s a tall building and if you have any sort of health or disability issue it’s good to know that the upper floors are accessible and there are plenty of elevators. Just as well as apparently kids don’t like to use stairs these days and for some strange reasons young parents think the museum is the ideal choice when they have toddlers in prams! Go figure. 😐

But I like the way the museum is divided up by floors as you will definitely not get everything done in one day and it’s good to know where you left off for your next visit. We intend to go back as we only scratched the surface of what this museum has to offer.

But the main attraction for us was the 4th Floor and the Gladiator exhibit. The wife is very interested in this subject - especially because of our 2014 visit to Rome & Pompeii - and I guess we are lucky in the sense that to this day we are still surrounded with the remnants of the Roman settlements in Britain.

Both the local cities of York and Hull have some very good archaeological features which illustrate the Roman's impact on the North of England.

Above: Part of the wonderful Roman Britain exhibit at Hull & East Riding Museum. Well worth a visit as they have some excellently preserved Roman floor mosaics.

Above: One of the bits of mock graffiti on the walls of the Hull Museum's Roman exhibit is this wonderful nod to Monty Python! Who says museum's don't have a sense of humour.

Anyway - back to Leeds... 😄 The Royal Armouries exhibit cantered around the Collosum in Rome, it's history and the gladiators who 'performed' there (if perform is the right word). It consisted of three or four linked rooms which displayed artifacts and recreations illustrating the activities of gladiatorial combat.

Above: A scale model of the Colosseum in Rome. We are so apt to see the Colosseum in it's ruined for today that we are not quite familiar with just what a spectacular piece of architecture that the original building was. It even put many contemporary stadiums to shame!

Sharon loved all the details included in the exhibit, she is a great 'plaque reader' and loves all the written information that accompanied each artifact, especially when it brought to life the human aspects of life in the gladiatorial arenas. For many of us, our perception of gladiators is derived mainly from Hollywood and movies like 'Spartacus' or Ridley Scott's epic 'Gladiator', but as epic as these films are they tend to focus on how gladiator's died and not how they lived.

Obviously, the fascination with the gladiator is primarily the combative nature of their lifestyle and the exhibit does lean into this as i does draw the crowds. It was not a coincidence - I think - that this exhibition was planned to coincide with the school holidays, as it is a topic that does interest the younger visitor and thus attracts the families (as we found out).

That said, anything that get's kids going to a museum and learning some history must be a good thing!

Above: Young at heart! Sharon could not resist trying on one of the Roman helmets that were on display specifically for the kids to try on. 😂

As I mentioned the exhibit spans over several rooms and only takes a hour to get around if - like Sharon - you don't read all the accompanying information of study the artifacts closely. So, it' wasn't a huge exhibition, but it was very well designed and - in particular - I appreciated the animated projections that accompanied the displays, these were really well done.

Overall, it was well worth the visit and the price (I got a disabled persons concession of just £4), especially when you factor in the free entry into the rest of the museum, so you could easily make a full day of it (or half a day before your kids ran out of steam). As I said earlier, The Royal Armouries deserves a repeat visit to be able to cover the large range of exabits it has.

Once we had finished the Gladiator exhibit, we went down to floor 2 (I think) to look at the medieval knights hall and - again - you could easily loose a morning or afternoon taking in what's on display there.

Rather fittingly, after an exhibit about 'performed violence' that was gladiatorial combat there is a nice little section dedicated to tournament jousting in the knightly hall. It is interesting to see how militaristic 'sport' evolved from the Roman time through to the medieval, although by this time is was becoming somewhat more sport than murderous spectacle (though definitely not WWE as yet)!

There was a nice nod to how jousting knights displayed their 'colours' so that they were recognisable to their fans, though this garnered some laughter from myself as Sharon asked me 'why a knight would wear a chicken on his hat?' 😂

Above: These highly detailed helmet ornaments did beg the question of how anyone could cope with such a weight atop their heads during a joust! It seems this was a problem and therefore light weight (paper mâché?) ornaments were eventually developed.

It did harken back to the Gladiator exhibit, though, in that one of the information boards did explain how even the gladiators had their sporting fans and that ancient Rome did not have formal 'fan clubs' and that popular gladiators had devoted followers who supported them in ways similar to modern sports fans. Some things never change!

We completed the medieval exhibit and left off just as the gunpowder age exhibits began. I took this picture so that we knew where we should start off again on our next visit...