Scotland Yard’s crime collection sentenced to six months at the Museum of London

Crime does not pay, Scotland Yard has discovered. Its private Crime Museum collection is to be opened up to the public, but it won’t be a pot of gold. Two years ago a wildly optimistic report by the Conservative deputy chairman of the Greater London Authority suggested that a travelling crime museum exhibition might attract 1.2m visitors a year. With tickets at £15 a head, this would raise millions of pounds to help fund front-line policing. Now a more realistic solution has been adopted: a six-month show at the Museum of London (9 October-10 April 2016). If all goes well, it might bring in 100,000 visitors. Artifacts promised range from a Jack the Ripper appeal poster of 1888 to a burnt laptop recovered from the terrorist attack on Glasgow airport in 2007. The exhibition, The Crime Museum Uncovered, will be a one-off event revealing the contents of a collection that has never been open to the public. Stephen Greenhalgh, London’s deputy mayor responsible for policing and crime, told The Art Newspaper that the long-term solution would be a permanent space to display highlights of the collection.