placesThe Lovett charms at Wellcome Collection

Lovett collected by swap. He was chief cashier at a bank in the City, lived in Croydon and later Caterham, and spent his free time asking dockers, costermongers and sailors' families what they carried and why, trading them alpine plants grown in seashells for it. He wrote it up in "Magic in Modern London" in 1925 and he did not theorise: he recorded who gave him the thing and what they said about it, and left the explaining alone. That restraint is why his labels still work a century later.

He and Henry Wellcome corresponded for years. In 1916 Lovett curated an exhibition, 'Folklore of London', at the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum at 54a Wigmore Street. In 1930, three years before Lovett died, Wellcome's museum bought from his collection of British amulets and charms: a mole's foot from Downham Market in Norfolk, carried loose in a pocket in the 1890s or 1900s, is still catalogued with that purchase note and is now in the Science Museum Group collection as A79966.

Wellcome's own writing on those objects reports the claims and names the claimants. In "Moles' feet, dried frogs and other folk medicines", published on its website by Kate Wilkinson on 21 May 2019, it gives the reasoning as its owners gave it: "the digging-foot of a mole (with its cramped appearance) is thought to be a cure for cramp". A dried frog in a silk bag was carried against fits; snake vertebrae were strung against pain in the lower back; a coil of eel skin was wound round the fingers, in Scotland, against cramp; a potato was the one people were still carrying, in a pocket, against rheumatism. An old woman in Devonshire used quartzite on warts.

The charms themselves went to Oxford. When Wellcome Collection showed them again in 'Charmed Life: The solace of objects', 6 October 2011 to 26 February 2012, the museum's own page says the 1,400 amulets the artist Felicity Powell worked with were "borrowed from Oxford University's Pitt Rivers Museum" — the same building Lovett had been giving to since the 1890s. Powell was one of few people to have had access to them; the page describes her as caught by the silent witness they bore to personal stories now lost. Her films and medals hung beside them.

The institution has since said how the wider collecting worked. In 2021 Wellcome Collection acknowledged that Henry Wellcome's collecting was shaped by colonialism, that many objects bought at auction around the turn of the twentieth century carried no record of how they had been got, and that they may have been "unjustly taken"; in 2025 it returned a group of Jain manuscripts to India. Inference — Lovett sits oddly inside that account, because his method was a trade on a street with the owner present, and this project has not read a Wellcome statement that treats his material as contested. Saying so is not a defence of it; it is a note about what is and is not on the record.

The galleries, library, café and shop at 183 Euston Road are free, and the building's own line is that "All our permanent and temporary exhibitions, and most of our events, are free." Photography is allowed for personal use in most exhibitions except where signs say otherwise. To see a Lovett charm you go to Oxford or to the Science Museum Group catalogue; to read his file you book the library here.