Museums & Attractions

Have we missed your London museums and exhibitions highlight of 2007? Let us know

Museums
London got two new museums in 2007: the Wellcome Collection, illuminating the development of medicine through the ages, and the Household Cavalry Museum, situated within the historic Horse Guards building. The National Maritime Museum unveiled a new planetarium and four new galleries at the Observatory exploring the concept of time; the Science Museum relaunched Launchpad, its interactive science-is-fun gallery for children, and the Natural History Museum opened the Vault to house its jewellery collection. The London Transport Museum reopened in November after a major revamp.

Exhibitions
With ‘Camouflage’ and its current show of war posters ‘Weapons of Mass Communication’, the Imperial War Museum consolidated its reputation for mounting superb shows to bring in new audiences without alienating existing fans. The V&A had the glitziest opening of the year when the fashion world showed up en masse for the launch of ‘The Golden Age of Couture’ and the British Museum took the bold step of using the Reading Room in the Great Court as a much-needed exhibition space big enough stage a show on the scale of ‘The First Emperor’.

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Bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade
The 200th anniversary was marked with a raft of exhibitions and events and the opening of two permanent galleries: London, Sugar and Slavery at the Museum in Docklands and Atlantic Worlds at the National Maritime Museum.

Events
This summer grey turned to green as the concrete façade of the National Theatre’s Lyttleton Flytower sprouted grass, thanks to an installation by artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey. And brooding figures from the Hayward Gallery’s Anthony Gormley exhibition colonised the skyline around the South Bank (shame they didn’t become a permanent fixture). In November the opening of the new Eurostar terminal at St Pancras was marked by a week-long programme of arts events in the area – but it was the fact that the station can now boast the longest Champagne bar in Europe that got most attention.

Fire and rain
The summer’s endless rain really wasn’t funny but there was a certain dramatic irony when the set for ‘The Merchant of Venice’ at Shakespeare’s Globe was flooded. More alarmingly, in May the Cutty Sark went up in flames. The good news was that the last of the great 1840s tea clippers was undergoing major restoration work at the time, which meant that many of her ancient timbers had already been removed and so escaped the fire.