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.
In the framenews
Scotland Yard’s crime collection sentenced to six months at the Museum of London
4 June 2015