Opening next month at the Museum in Docklands is an exhibition called ‘Jack the Ripper and the East End’. London has always had a bit of an eerie fascination with Jack the Ripper, and there have been numerous films, TV programmes and video games made about the famous unsolved serial killings of prostitutes in the late 1800s, so it was only a matter of time before the subject got given an exhibition treatment.

The exhibition’s angle is to explore both the murders of Jack the Ripper, and their ‘enduring legacy’. Exhibits include photographs and documents from the police investigation. The exhibition is ‘not recommended’ for children under the age of 12, which makes it sound a bit more exciting, although it’s unlikely to be on the same level of creepiness as the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds.

Advance bookings are now being taken, and you can get 20% off by jumping through a few hoops at Jack’s Notorious Notes.

Jack the Ripper and the East End is on at the Museum in Docklands in London from 15 May until 2 November 2008. Admission charges apply.

To enjoy great exhibitions and museums, you no longer have to take either take time off or endure the weekend crowds. An increasing number of museums and galleries are staying open late into the evening, providing a whole different experience that’s more geared towards adults and often includes DJs and drinking. Some museums even lay on a full line-up of talks and late-night events.

As late night opening isn’t yet a daily or even weekly event, to attend you’ll have to know when and where they’re on. Which is where the list below may come in handy.

  • V&A Friday Late - each event has a theme, and usually features talks and workshops, as well as a DJ. Last Friday of each month (except December), until 10PM. Free.
  • late @ Museum of London - these events sometimes feature music and storytelling, but the next one is a pub quiz. First Thursday of each month, until 9PM. Free.
  • late @ Museum in Docklands - these events feature live music and and comedy performances. The next one looks at East London’s Asian music scene and history. First Thursday of each month, until 9PM. Free from 4:30 onwards.
  • Geffrye Museum First Thursday Open Evenings - at these events you experience the delightful galleries and gardens of the museum, complete with a glass of wine. The May event also includes a social history and old food tasting session. First Thursday of each month, until 8PM. Free.
  • Late at Tate Britain - a good chance to visit if you want to avoid the crowds. There’s also usually an event of some sort - the next one features an audiovisual collective presenting the ‘AV Social’. Last Friday of each month, until 10PM. Free, with half-price entry to the special exhibitions.
  • Late at Tate Modern - the Tate Modern started staying open late almost as soon as it first opened in 2000. Additional evening events include The Long Weekend, in May, which includes a night of audiovisual performances and a set of film screenings. The Tate Modern is open late every Friday and Saturday, until 10PM. Free.
  • Late at Tate Liverpool - music, food and drink accompany these late openings, as well as themed tours and occassional performances. Last Thursday of every month, until 9PM. Free.
  • Late events at the British Museum - this museum is open late almost more often than not at the moment, thanks in large part to the popularity of its First Emperor exhibition (see review). If you just want to hang out in the Great Court though, a Chinese food themed evening features food tasting, live music, traditional games and a dance workshop. China Late: Food is on 3 April 2008, until 9PM. Free.
  • National Gallery Wednesay Lates - this weekly event includes live music and a series of ‘bite-sized talks’ on the collections, which at ten minutes each are short enough for anyone to enjoy. Every Wednesday, until 9PM. Free.
  • Late opening at the National Portrait Gallery - this museum stays open late every Thursday and Friday, giving you plenty of opportunity to explore the rooms, as well as the latest exhibitions (see Vanity Fair Portraits review). The Fridays though also include live music (mostly classical), if that’s your bag. If not, you could always go for a drink on the rooftop bar. Late openings are every Thursay and Friday, until 9PM. Free.

For additional information about late-night museum and gallery events, there are a few other websites worth visiting. First Thursdays covers art events in East London (on the first Thursday of each month, as the name suggests), supported by the Arts Council England in association with Time Out London. Lates covers a range of events across London, on various days of the week, funded by the Mayor of London in association with thelondonpaper, and includes a mailing list and a Facebook group you can sign up to for regular updates.

The latest exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery takes a look at 95 years worth of photographic portraits that have been published in the American culture/fashion magazine Vanity Fair. Many of the photos have gone on to become recognisable icons, whilst the photographers include a huge range of famous names.

The exhibition contains 150 or so prints, arranged chronologically along the walls of a fairly small room. If you follow the timeline, which nearly everyone does, creating a kind of people carousel, you’ll notice a few things. Firstly, the prints get bigger and bigger as you move round. The earliest photos are tiny, requiring you to elbow someone out of the way to get a closeup view, whilst some of the later ones are displayed as enormous prints, making it easy to walk backward into someone as you step back to take in the full picture (a huge photo of Margaret Thatcher is particularly startling).

Secondly, the subjects photographed by and large get more recognisable, and less noteworthy, as you move round. Early subjects include philosophers and scientists, as well as entertainers like Charlie Chaplin, whereas towards the end you find yourself wondering exactly which American sitcom it is that you recognise that actress from.

Some of the most interesting exhibits are the prints that have been scribbled on by the magazine editors with notes about where to crop the image and so on. There are also several photographs paired up with the magazine covers that they appeared on, giving you a bit more in the way of context. In fact, you can end up wishing they’d have done this with a few more of the photographs.

The mix of subjects covered is quite striking, and reflects the varying types of article in the magazine. Some of the portraits have a clear news purpose, such as the chilling composition of the United States War Cabinet at the time of the Afghanistan invasion. Others fulfil more of a traditional glossy magazine remit, such as the Photoshopped-together montages of up-and-coming American actresses.

The exhibition really though is really one for photography fans and enthusiasts. The labels accompanying each of the photos give the barest of details, containing mostly just some fairly dull biographical information about the photographer or subject (flipping seemingly randomly between the two). There’s little attempt to explain the significance of the portrait, or even where and how it was taken - which would have been especially interesting for some of the more creatively set up shots.

If you do visit this exhibition, and are happy just to take in the portraits, absorbing the photography, then be sure to visit at a time when it’s fairly quite, if you want to be in with the chance of having an at all relaxing experience. Otherwise, consider just buying the exhibition catalogue, or even just browsing the Vanity Fair website.

Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913 - 2008 is on at the National Portrait Gallery in London until 26 May 2008. Admission charges apply.

If you hadn’t noticed, there’s a certain Chinese flavour in the air at the moment. The obvious reason for this is that 2008 is an Olympic year, and Bejing in China is the venue. Whilst that may be the cause, the China fever effect is being felt far beyond the boundaries of sport.

In the UK, an not-for-profit organisation called China Now are co-ordinating a series of events to celebrate Chines culture, starting in February with the Chinese New Year, and running right up to the opening of the Olympic Games in August.

Unsurprisingly, these events include several exhibitions. The China Now website is a little hard to navigate, so some of the highlights are presented below:

The big exhibition that China Now are promoting though is the V&A’s China Design Now, which opened last week. The exhibition takes a look at some of the high profile contemporary design being produced in three of China’s biggest cities: Bejing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. It’s the exhibition, above all the others, which seems to be promoting China as the vision it wants to be: a modern, high-tech, cultural powerhouse of the world. The exhibition is open until 13 July 2008. Full review coming soon.

This blog now has a corresponding Great Exhibitions group on the photo-sharing site Flickr. Anyone can join, and post their photos from exhibitions (great or otherwise) to the collective ‘pool’ . Hopefully it’ll present an interesting new view on the exhibitions that are currently capturing people’s imaginations in the UK.

A selection of the most recent recent pictures from the pool are also displayed automatically on the photos page of this website.

If you’re already a member of Flickr, then join the group without delay. If you’re not, well it’s free and (relatively) easy, and a great site for exploring and sharing photographs - whether you took them with a posh camera or not.

The latest exhibition at the Design Museum has a very simple purpose: to showcase the 100 shortlisted entries in their new annual Design Awards (sponsored by Brit Insurance). Divided into seven categories - architecture, graphics, fashion, product, furniture, interactive and transport - the nominations were made by design experts from the respective disciplines, with a grand jury currently deciding the winners.

Walking around the exhibition is a mixed experience, with the exhibits being so varied. You can’t help but go around spotting which ones you’ve seen or read about before, keeping a mental tally to evaluate how on-the-pulse your design knowledge is. More worthwhile though is the discovery of the new, such as gorgeous mobile phone designed by Tokujin Yoshioka, or the innovative and playful PizzaKobra table lamp, which can be flexed into either of the shapes that its name suggests. Also worth playing with is the Tenori-on electronic musical instrument, which is both intuitive and duffer-proof, enabling anyone to quickly compose nice-sounding tunes.

Whilst the products probably hold the most popular appeal (a Wii and an iPhone are also featured), the transport and architecture projects are also pretty engaging. Several of the transport entrants will be interesting to Londoners in particular, such as the Christoph Behling designed solar powered boat, which shuttles passengers across the Serpentine lake in summer months. There’s details too about how the number-plate recognising CCTV cameras were overhauled for the western extension of the congestion charging zone. Londoners should also pay attention to the designs of the Velib communal bike hire project, currently operating in Paris, which politicians are hoping to export to the capital.

The Replenishing Body Kiosk

Within the ‘interactive’ category, two of the entrants are set up as live installations that you can try out yourself. SHOWstudio’s The Replenishing Body Kiosk (pictured above), features a projection with a five by five grid of 1 second looping videos, recorded by visitors using an attached video camera. The nature of this exhibit means it’s constantly changing, giving you a view of the recent visitors. Direct participation involves a certain amount of extrovert performance, but it’s not too hard to think of a second’s worth of amusing body animation.

Even more intriguing is a piece called Private View, by Paul Cocksedge Studio. At first appearing to be nothing more than a blank, black wall, if you follow the instructions to take a photo of it with your digital camera/cameraphone, an image is magically revealed. How it works exactly is a mystery, but it’s certainly a neat and novel trick, if limited in its application.

The fashion, graphics and architecture categories are a little less visitor friendly, although there’s a good deconstruction of a project by Ian Cartlidge to redesign the signage system at the Selfridges department store. Also worth picking out are the architectural designs for the Stephen Lawrence Centre, which opened in Lewisham, London recently, and was shockingly vandalised soon after.

The seven category winners in this competition will be announced on 11 March, with the overall winner being declared on 18 March. Visit before then if you want to have a go at picking out your own preferences, or after then if you want to see whether you agree with the judges. Either way, wandering through this exhibition is a rewarding experience, and acts as a good shop window into the rich and varied world of design.

Brit Insurance Designs of the Year is on at the Design Museum in London until 27 April 2007. Admission charges apply.

Audio tours are a pretty standard offering at exhibitions nowadays. They’ve become quite sophisticated too, with codes allowing you to listen to the various chapters in any order you want. Usually, though, you’ll have to pay for the privilege of renting the handset, and it’s difficult to tell in advance whether it’ll be worth it.

Increasingly, museums are offering audio tours as free mp3s that you can download to your personal audio player and listen to in the exhibition. This has the advantage that different kinds of audio tour can be offered. In fact, they don’t even have to have been produced by the institution they’re about - anyone can make them. The only problem with this is that you have to remember to download the tour before you go, making spontaneous visits a bit more tricky. However if the downloadable audio tours are interesting and well publicised enough, they’ll be the thing that motivated you to visit the exhibition in the first place.

With that in mind, this post lists some of the downloadable audio tours currently available for museums and exhibitions in the UK. If you do try and of them out, you can post your experience in the comments below (let us know if there any other tours we can add to the list too).

The downloadable audio tours:

Note: if you’re looking for downloadable audio tours, it’s worth bearing in mind that some museums seem to mistakenly call them ‘podcasts’.

The exhibition space in the Building Centre (also sometimes marketed under the ‘New London Architecture’ brand) is still fairly unknown, making it feel like a great discovery when you first stumble across it. The space really took off in July 2005, with the building of a huge scale model of London, which is now on permanent display and often updated with the latest proposed development. As well as this, there’s a rolling programme of temporary exhibitions devoted to different aspects of London planning, design and architecture. Underground is the latest of these, taking a look at the warren of tunnels and hidden infrastructure beneath the city.

The exhibition narrative runs roughly chronologically, and so starts off at King’s Cross station, underneath which Queen Boudica is said to have been buried, sparking a fascination with the subterranean that Londoners have held ever since. Historic underground structures in the city include roman ruins, buried rivers, and coffin-housing catacombs built when traditional cemeteries filled up during the Black Death.

The most famous sort of underground infrastructure in London is of course the tube network, and correspondingly ‘transport’ is one of the key exhibition themes. Looking back, there are some photographs of disused tube stations, tube stations used as air raid shelters, and tube stations connected to secret security bunkers. In more contemporary terms, there’s a look at the Jubilee line extension, the ‘High Speed 1′ Eurostar link to St Pancras, and the planned Crossrail project. The star exhibit, though, is an architectural scale model of the complex network of underground lines beneath King’s Cross. The colour-coded tubes let you see how the Picadilly, Circle, Metropolitan, Victoria, Northern and Thameslink lines manage to snake their way around each other in a way that would be impossible to explain in a two dimensional diagram.

Other underground infrastructures covered include London’s historic sewer system, built by the Victorians to such a high specification that it has only just begun to reach its full capacity today. There’s also a feature on the Thames Water Ring Main, an incredible network of deep-level tunnels (twice as far down as the Underground) built in 1993 to improve the supply of drinking water around London. Further forward, there’s a look at the possible underground infrastructure of the future, including eco-friendly combined heat and power services, and a ‘multi-utility’ system being planned for Elephant and Castle.

Despite being contained a small space, the exhibition offers a glimpse into all manner of interesting underground projects and services. Whilst it’s mostly text and images, there are also a few videos and a good selection of models to keep you interested. Plus, you get an excellent free exhibition catalogue to take home, full of photographs and extra information.

A series of breakfast talks accompany the exhibition, including one by Andrew Smith from Subterranea Britannica, a society dedicated to the study of some of the more esoteric man-made underground structures, which promises to be interesting.

If you live in London, it’s definitely worth seeking out this exhibition, especially if you haven’t been to the Building Centre before. Just remember though, it’s unfortunately not open on weekends.

Underground: London’s Hidden Infrastructure is on at the Building Centre in London until 19 April 2008. Admission free.

Like many museums, the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden (which re-opened recently), has a large portion of its collection held off-site in a storage facility. Being a transport museum with a lot of very large objects (trains and buses), the storage facility is an ex tube depot in Acton, and this weekend is one of the few weekends each year when it’s open for visitors.

Billed as ‘London’s Transport in Miniature’, the two day event is partly an annual model railway convention, with exhibitors showing off displays of tiny tube trains (and other types of trains) moving around miniature scenes of London from yesteryear. Whilst these are more impressive than they sound, the anorak factor is quite high, and you’ll probably find yourself more drawn to the more life-sized trains from the museum’s collection. If you’re lucky, you’ll even get to walk inside a few of them, evoking memories of old tube train interiors, back when there were leather straps or metal springy bobbles to hold onto.

It’s not just trains and buses, the depot is a treasure trove of all sorts of London transport paraphernalia, including old signs, ticket machines and so on. With the Covent Garden museum having been redeveloped, I wouldn’t be surprised to find bits from old exhibitions and galleries too.

This weekend there will also be a special guest visit by ‘Sarah Siddon’, who’s not a person, but the last working electric locomotive that served on the Metropolitan Railway (the forerunner to today’s Metropolitan line). Electric locomotives replaced the earlier steam engines that ran on the line, but were eventually replaced themselves by the electric ‘powered carriages’ that we see today.

There’s also a rideable minature railway outside the depot, which kids (and unembarrassed adults) will be able to take little mini journeys on for a few pennies. Fun for all the family.

London’s Transport in Miniature is on at the London Transport Museum Depot in Acton on Saturday 8 and Sunday 9 March 2008. Admission charges apply.

Figures released yesterday show that most museums enjoyed an increase in visitor numbers in 2007, led by the British Museum which had 5.4 million visitors (up 12%). The British Museum’s success is partly down to its hugely successful Terracotta Army exhibition (see our review).

The Tate Modern was the next most visited museum, with 5.2 million visitors (up 6%), followed by the National Gallery with 4.2 million visitors (down 8%), the Natural History Museum with 3.6 million (down 4%) and the Science Museum with 2.7 million (up 11%).

The Association of Leading Visitor Attractions, which published the figures, pointed to the ‘wet summer’, which had a negative effect on outdoor attractions like Blackpool Pleasure Beach (which still received 5.5 million visitors, down 3%), although may have actually brought more visitors to museums. It also criticised the government for “refusing to “take tourism seriously”, citing a lack of funds to VisitBritain and high visa charges for foreign visitors. The association also suggested the weakness of the dollar against the pound may have put off American visitors, although the strong Euro may have compensated against this to a degree.

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