One mile of London.

Ten museums.

One evening of intriguing insights, amazing projects and behind-the-scenes gossip.

It can only be… MUSEUMS MILE SHOWOFF!

Yes, we’re going to be at the Grant Museum, 21 University Street, WC1E 6DE on Tuesday 15 October as part of the Bloomsbury Festival. All the acts will come from or be about Museums Mile. Doors open at 7pm, the show starts at 7.30pm.

Entry is free, but we’ll be collecting donations on the door for our charity of the month ZSL’s EDGE of Existence, which highlights and conserves species on the verge of extinction. We suggest £5.

Taking to the stage for this extravaganza of wit and wisdom, objects and exhibitions are:

Steve Cross – your compère for the evening, he critiques museums through the medium of t-shirts.

Catherine Walker –Wellcome Collection has been on a Curiosity Roadshow to Camden Lock Market in a converted Routemaster bus. See how the Visitor Services team took the Collection out to a new audience, including objects, images and even the shop!

Mark Carnall – Teaspoons through the ages,  every hearing aid every produced, thousands of fossil fish. This is some of the stuff that lurks in the storerooms of museums awaiting some bizarre apocalypse whereby niche esoteric knowledge might save us? The Grant Museum’s Mark Carnall looks at why celebrating otherwise underwhelming museum objects such as the Underwhelming Fossil Fish of the Month blog series is a bit less dishonest than pretending museum collections must save the world to be worth keeping.

Ailsa Forbes – Exit through the Gift Shop: I’m spreading a little merchandise enlightenment as a Retail Consultant and Product Developer for some of London’s illuminating museums, cultural and heritage sights.  From saucy Toulouse-Lautrec to Brains and stark Modernism, there’s a range for them all!

Leonie Hannan – Introducing the 100 Hours Project, which takes 10 researchers and 10 museum objects and puts them together for 100 hours of quality time. In a mere 9 minutes, discover how a dog whistle became the object of an historian’s affections, how a student of design fell for a ten-legged stool, and join the group obsession with UCL’s rare and wonderful collections.

Kath Biggs – ‘Did they have supermarkets in ancient Greece?’ and other tales from the British Museum. I’ll be exposing my own stupidity when faced with some tough questioning from children aged as young as four.

Hayley Kruger – Who was the better collector John Hunter or Henry Wellcome? The father of scientific surgery with a nifty line in experiments, or moustachioed Yank pill-pusher with more money than sense? You get the chance to decide but Hayley will be pulling no punches in round one of this epic collector v collector smackdown – only one will walk away! (Although both are actually dead.) #TeamHunter

Kristin Hussey – Who cares about some old Scottish surgeon with syphilis? Kristin will be fighting the corner of Sir Henry Wellcome (obsessive collector and owner of a world famous moustache) in round two of the epic Collector Throwdown the likes of which has never been seen before. It ends tonight. #TeamHenry

Gregory Akerman – Bloomsbury has held the country’s best museums since Hans Sloane decided to consolidate all his collections into the British Museum, but why did he choose Bloomsbury, and has this choice helped shape the way our museums have grown? Gregory will explore this decision and how it accidentally kicked off a debate about what a museums role should be.

Frances Sands & Cynthia Adobea-Aidoo – How different departments at Sir John Soane’s Museum are communicating the collection to a wider audience.

Summer is over. Boo!

Museums Showoff is back! Hurrah!

We’ll be upstairs at The Black Heart, 3 Greenland Place, NW1 0AP on Tuesday 1st October with more top museum people prepared to divulge the best bits about their work and dish all the inside info. Doors open at 7pm, the show starts at 7.30pm. Entry is free, but we’ll be collecting on the door for our charity of the month, Aston Mansfield, which works to tackle poverty, deprivation and disadvantage in east London. We suggest a donation of £5.

Lining up to strut their museums stuff in a wondrous extravaganza of wit and wisdom will be:

Steve Cross – your compère for the evening: telling jokes, introducing acts and keeping things to time.

Rosie Clarke – “The Picassos are here!” I’ll be telling the inspiring story of how, in an early example of crowdfunding, the Swiss city of Basel came together in 1967 to save their beloved Picasso paintings. Young people begged for donations under the motto “All You Need Is Pablo” … but what did Picasso himself think of these shenanigans?

Miki Webb & Jenna Byers – Museums on the front line: we’ve spent our summer working as visitor assistants at Royal Museums Greenwich. These are our experiences, stories and tips on how not to visit a museum!

Michael Smith – How we named The Beaney House of Art & Knowledge (in Canterbury) and then designed everything from their toilet signs to the detail of their banner brackets.

Eva Amsen – The Museum of Jurassic Technology is possibly the only museum that consistently makes its visitors question reality. I’ll tell you about some of its exhibits, but I won’t blame you if you don’t believe me.

Catherine Jones – Turning a 1920s radio into a 21st century exhibit and showing your love of exhibits through flashing LEDS. Two projects: one official, one a bit less so.

Lucy Carruthers & Abby Coombs – Hear from two myth-busting museum designers, attempting to dismantle a collection of misconceptions and who think that together we can reach a solution for positive creative collaboration.

Claire Reed & Lauryn Etheridge – Lessons learned from an exciting collaboration between UCL and the National Trust to create ‘The Trappings of Trade’ exhibition, which reveals the world of commercial men at Osterley Park House during the eighteenth century and explores global stories in the twenty-first.

Ivo Dawnay – Big Brother and me: a comic unveiling of the Big Brother & National Trust marriage.

Roll up, roll up. Get your Museums Showoff action here! Let’s face it, you’ve worked hard this year. You need an evening to sit back, relax and hear fascinating tales and intriguing insights from some top class museum talent. And wow, have we got a line up for you!

Museums Showoff is back on Tuesday 25 June. We’ll be upstairs at The Black Heart, 3 Greenland Place, NW1 0AP. Doors open at 7pm, the show starts at 7.30pm. Entry is free, but we’ll be collecting on the door for our charity of the month KEEN London, which provides free one-to-one sports and recreational opportunities for young people with special needs. We suggest a donation of £5.

Strutting their stuff in an amazing museum extravaganza will be:

Steve Cross – your compere for the night. Will he mention the Science Museum? Well, what do you think?

Finbarr Whooley –The things you learn when working in museums… The longer I work in museums the more weird I realise that they are. Underneath a veneer of respectability and order they are truly strange places that employ strange people and attract some even stranger punters. I invite the audience to join me on my journey of discovery into the strange netherworld of the museum; a world of crushing monotony and exotic exuberance.

Mar Dixon & Samuel Bausson – We will talk about Museomix & how anyone can get involved remixing a museum to create something that is more open, networked and that evolves with its users and visitors.

Roberta Wedge – The Mysterious Case of the Empty Victorians. What’s the smallest museum you’ve ever been to, and the most unprepared curator you’ve ever met? Shrink the former and multiply the latter, and you’ll have some inkling of what’s coming up: Mary Wollstonecraft, miniaturised.

We Are Goose – The Hunterian Museum in London is a secret treasure trove of 300 pickled dead things, gathered together by John Hunter – one of the most incredible unsung heroes of surgery. We Are Goose have written a one hour musical comedy about him for the Edinburgh Fringe and want to share their love of his collection.

Claire Ross – I’ll be discussing the highs and lows from a first time exhibition curator including why you should never work with technology, asbestos, Fleming Valves or industrial measures of jelly beans.

Stevyn Colgan – I work at an exciting, dynamic museum that doesn’t exist. I’m one of the writers of BBC R4’s Museum of Curiosity – QI’s sister show and, in my talk I’m going to reveal some of the more surprising donations we’ve had, how closely we work with real museums, and ask the audience to help us build up our exhibit list for next year.

Alice Hockey – Takeover Day in Museums – is it safe to hand over control? What happens when we ask young people to run our museums

Adrian Shaw – I’ll be presenting 9 minutes of surreal, slightly humerous art institution-inspired observations in a light Barnsley accent.

Hello London! Recovered from the marathon? Ready to have a sit down, a drink and hear amazing things about museums? We’ve got a fabulous evening lined up for you, with ten top museum people showing off the best bits about their work.

Museums Showoff is back on Tuesday 14 May. We’ll be at our new home, upstairs at The Black Heart, 3 Greenland Place, NW1 0AP. Doors open at 7pm, the show starts at 7.30pm. Entry is free, but we’ll be collecting on the door for our charity of the month.

Strutting their stuff on stage, divulging things about museums that you’ve never even thought of, will be:

Steve Cross – a man whose entire knowledge of museums consists of ways to tease the Science Museum.

Sharon Ament – Museums: are we just too polite? What Old Flo has to teach us about how standing up for what we believe in creates a wide-reaching resonance.

Lola Arellano-Weddleton – I’ll be talking about my attempt in 2012 (and again this year) to visit a museum daily, and what I’ve learned through the logistical challenges of becoming a glutton for culture. In particular, I’ll talk about museums in Warsaw, Poland, where I was living last year, on a Fulbright research grant in museum studies.

Ruth Adams – The Curious Tale of Tipu’s Tiger: Or the story of how a notorious man eating musical instrument was kidnapped from India and brought to London, to be immortalised in poetry, chocolate and cyberspace.

Adrian Murphy & Vicky Pearce – We will be talking about what it’s like to be the voice of museum on Twitter – the highs, the lows, the fun and games, taking a journey from Macedonian socks to Ethiopian lyres via many, many pangolins. And we’ll try to give you actual, practical top tips if you have to be your museums’ voice but we may just make lots of puns and alliteration.

Emily Yates – Sherlock Holmes and The Museum Inaccuracy. Sherlock Holmes may be a clever guy, but when running around a museum he does have some odd ideas about how we operate. I have set up my own casebook of investigations into how museums operate in the Holmesian world, and why we may disagree with him.

Kat Nilsson – Kat expresses her love for science and frustration with the personalities of objects available to tell science stories. When did they become so bland and what on earth can be done about it?

Rachel Jennings – Museums are a lot like icebergs: what’s on display is just a tiny part of the whole, and what’s hidden is much more interesting! I will take you on a brief tour through the weird and wonderful world of stored collections at the Horniman Museum.

Meriel Jeater – A little-known part of the Museum of London’s medieval collection is its bawdy badges depicting male and female genitalia, amusing visual puns and mating chickens. Why were these badges made and who wore them? Curator Meriel Jeater explores the sexy side of medieval life and asks whether these badges are as naughty as they might seem to modern eyes.

Miranda Stearn – What’s all this contemporary art doing in my museum? From Grayson Perry at the British Museum to Mark Wallinger at the National Gallery, recently it’s been hard to escape contemporary interventions in our museums. I’ll be showing off my PhD research musing on why this might be.

Richard Sandling – Richard Sandling collects Videos. He has so many he would like to turn his house into a VHS museum. Could he? Should he? Can he? How do you even become a museum? Find out tonight!

Hoorah! It’s nearly spring. The days are longer, there are buds on the trees, birds are singing, I’m sure there will be warm weather, sun and blue skies very soon… We should celebrate! What better way to do that than spend an evening listening to 10 amazing people entertain you with stories and songs about museums?

Museums Showoff will be at the Wilmington Arms, 69 Rosebery Ave, EC1 on Wednesday March 6th. Doors are at 7pm. Entry is free, but we will be collecting on the door for our charity of the month, Peckham Shed, which runs innovative theatre workshops in a supportive place for 5-17 year olds living in and around SE London. We strongly suggest a donation of £5.

Strutting their stuff on stage in an extravaganza of behind-the-scenes revelations, wit and wisdom are:

Steve Cross – Your compère for the evening. Steve tells jokes, eats sweets and wears silly t-shirts, sometimes simultaneously.

Gemma Holland & Meredith Wood – Join a dynamic duo from the Museum of Brands in Notting Hill for an interactive and explosive show-case of consumer history. Meet items from the collection and hear wondrous facts about the unique and vast treasures on display as well as win free tickets to the Museum. Described by visitors as a “hidden treasure” the team is here to show you that everything has a story waiting to be told.

Tim Gardom – Take to the streets! The right place for culture is outside a museum. Tim
Gardom explains, attempting the Pecha Kucha format (20 slides, 20 seconds per
slide).

Dan Schreiber – For the last 5 years I’ve been co-running a museum on radio called The Museum Of Curiosity. We have a great collection including the Big Bang when it was the size of a grapefruit, the first story ever told, and Nothing. I’ve recently noticed that other museums have some pretty good stuff too. So I’ve made a list of things I’d like to plunder from them all.

Tom Miles – I will talk about the project to digitise a representative sample of the Museum of Writing’s collection, introducing objects from the collection and discussing how social media has enabled the collection to be brought to a wider audience.

Dan Simpson – I’m going to be talking about how videogames are (and are not) represented in museums / galleries, and raising the whole ‘are videogames art?’ type questions. But, you know, in a funny way.

Anouk Gouvras – I work at the Natural History Museum, one of 300 scientists. I will talk a bit about working at the NHM, some random fun facts, how the NHM became involved in controlling a debilitating parasitic disease in sub-Saharan Africa (Schistosomiasis aka Bilharzia), the Schistosome Collection at the NHM and there may be a very geeky Schisto song at the end.

Sarah Punshon – Telling lies and resisting dinosaurs; or, what happened when a theatre director was let loose on the Natural History Museum for a year. Complete with pictures of small happy children and a game of Spot the Scientist.

Jack Ashby – Natural history museums, whilst being awesome, are deeply unrepresentative of nature – it’s often said that 95% of known animal species are smaller than your thumb, but have you noticed how most museums fill their displays with big animals? To right this wrong, the Grant Museum has built The Micrarium – a beautiful back-lit cave displaying 2323 microscope slides containing amazingly prepared miniscule animals – hoping to give some attention to the huge diversity of tiny lives.

Martin Austwick – Singer-songwriter Martin Austwick has never worked for a museum, although he has been in one, and has played at the British Library (which is like a museum for books) until everyone started shushing him and security arrived. He has songs about old things (well, Gutenberg’s printing press) and dust (well, Brownian Motion) so he imagines he’ll feel right at home at Museum Showoff.

Say BOO to the January blues. Forget that it’s cold and dull. Cheer yourself up by watching amazing acts from across the museums world reveal behind-the-scenes stories and incredible projects.

Museums Showoff 5 will be at the Wilmington Arms, EC1 at 7pm on January 17^th. Taking to the stage for this extravaganza of objects and exhibitions are:

Steve Cross – will be our compère for the night. What will he say about the Science Museum this time?

Nick Poole – Yes (Culture) Minister:  9 minutes, 10 years, 7 Secretaries of State for Culture Media and Sport. A fast-paced review of the glittering academy of unforgettable stars that have held the Government’s top culture job. What have they done with it? Why did they do it? Where are they now? What does it take to be a Minister for Culture? And which one of them once accused me of something he liked to call ‘unthink’?

Katherine Curran – “Heritage Smells or The Terrible Fate of Tropical Ken”. Delivered entirely in verse, this will be both a description of my research project and an account of the dreadful things that happened to a Ken doll who found himself in one of UCL’s laboratories.

Danny Birchall ­– Why wrap the Freud Museum in ropes made of doll’s hair? Danny will present a lightning tour of artists’ interventions in museum spaces, from notorious pisstaker Marcel Duchamp to neo-neuroticist Alice Anderson.

Alice Bell ­– Why the very idea of a science museum is just plain silly, but if we’re going to have them they should be less like Harrods and more like a junk yard.

Alison Boyle & Harry Cliff – Higgs bosons, hadrons, high-energy physics … it’s a huge and incredibly complex machine, with lots of people busy doing things that nobody else understands. But that’s enough about the Science Museum. Find out what happened when Harry met Ali and the world of museums collided with the world of CERN.

Researchers in Museums – Gemma Angel, Sarah Chaney, Suzanne Harvey, Felicity Winkley, Lisa Plotkin, Tzu-i Liao and Alicia Thornton are a UCL-based gestalt entity whose mission is to engage the public with their research and UCL’s museum collections in ways never before explored. Bringing together their expertise in diverse subject areas, the team presents “Foreign Bodies” – their very first interdisciplinary group-curated exhibition, which opens in February 2013 at UCL.

Peter Ride – #Citizencurators was a twitter project that ran during the 2012 Olympics organised by Museum of London and Univ of Westminster. It’s goal was to collect Londoners response to living in London during the games – a social history for the museum collection. But it also also asked the question how can a museum collect tweets – as database, a visual object or a string of individual lines?

Hayley Kruger – is going to talk about some of the stranger steps on the path that paved the way to modern blood donation and provides a salutary warning of why it is unwise to be related to an anatomist and predecease them…!

The Ministry of Curiosity – will be recruiting for the newly founded collective dedicated to London’s museum social scene.

Jason Webber – Come the inevitable Zombie Apocalypse, which Museum will give you the best chance of survival? Who has the collection and venue to hold off the slaving hordes of the un-dead?

Entry is free, but we will be collecting on the door for our charity of the month, which is 1A Arts Association, a community initiative helping people develop skills through arts projects. We strongly suggest a donation of £5.