Museums

The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & Natural History

A cabinet of curiosities in a Hackney basement, two-headed lambs and dodo bones with hardly a label between them, and an absinthe bar above.

Viktor Wynd opened this in 2014 as the Last Tuesday Society's answer to the tidy museum: a cabinet of curiosities in the seventeenth-century manner, everything at once and nothing explained. In the basement on Mare Street are dodo bones and the feathers of extinct birds, the skeleton of a giant anteater, two-headed lambs and an eight-legged one, shrunken heads and tribal skulls, a mermaid, the nails from the artist Sebastian Horsley's crucifixion, the largest showing anywhere of the occult artist Austin Osman Spare, a wall of Leonora Carrington, celebrity hair and stranger celebrity leavings, and the condoms used by the Rolling Stones. It is insured for a million pounds and takes itself precisely as seriously as it should. The bar upstairs is the Absinthe Parlour, and the society runs lectures, séances and exhibitions of artists such as Alasdair Gray from the same rooms.

Where

11 Mare Street, E8 4RP

Nearest station

Cambridge Heath · 4 min walk

Hours

NearbyMuseums

• Vagina Museum6 min walk
• Young V&A8 min walk
• Hackney Museum14 min walk

NearbyOther Categories

• FornoBakeries1 min walk
• Yeast BakeryBakeries2 min walk
• Five Points Taproom & CourtyardBeer2 min walk

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