The Big Smoke

I’ve written before about the need for the Metropolitan Police to have their own museum – this would be a great way for the beleaguered Met to meet the public face-to-face and try to win their support and trust after recent problems. Well, it’s finally happened, albeit in truncated form, with the opening of the bijou Met Collection in the lobby of a Met-owned building on Lillie Road in West Brompton. Feature continues

Be warned: it is very small – half-a-dozen cases asked to tell the story of 180 years of policing in London. But the content is good: the 100 or so exhibits range from nineteenth-century cutlasses to the uniform Jack Warner wore for ‘Dixon Of Dock Green’ (some of the old uniforms are being modelled by the charming models in this photograph). There are also special displays on the role of women in the police force and on the Met during the Second World War. The white, modern space is also going to be used as a recruitment centre, but if you’re only there for the museum you should be done in 20 minutes: it's a good introduction to the Met and decent use of the space that is available.

This is the first time the Met has put items from their vast archive on display since the 1960s, when there was a shortlived exhibition at the now defunct Beak Street police station. And although the Met admit they are just ‘scraping the surface’ of what is available, they intend to rotate the displays using the 15,000 items that are stored in an archive in south-east London, so the exhibits should change regularly. However, you could rotate every day for year and there’s still not going to be enough space for the huge number of police vehicles, phone boxes and other large items that could potentially make Boris’s mooted ‘Blue Light Museum’ a London attraction to rival the London Transport Museum – if the relevant funding can be secured and as long as talk of the project is more than just hot air.

Sadly, though, it already looks like the window for this to happen has closed– the Met is said to be facing cuts of £366million over the next three years, making investment in a new museum something less of a priority. Perhaps the Met can raid the archive to stock up on vintage handcuffs, helmets and cutlasses the next time the G20 are in town.

Met Collection, Ground Floor, Empress State Building, Empress Approach, Lillie Road, SW6 1TR. Map here.