I’ve tried to explain this place to my friends many times, but they never quite got it. Until I said, it’s like going to a supermarket in Chinatown. You’ll find chicken feet, bird’s nest soup, century eggs, dragon fruit, stinky tofu, wife cakes, fat noodles, thin noodles, white noodles, yellow noodles, duck embryos and even Pokémon-branded canned drinks. At that point, they go, “Ah, weird things!” Yes, quite right. Except, of course, one man’s meat is another man’s poison.
When Aladdin promised Jasmine “a whole new world”, what he really meant was a magic carpet ride to an oriental supermarket. It’s what happens after “happily ever after” — you just haven’t seen it yet.
The The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities is part museum, part cocktail bar in Hackney. The place is mad, perverse and at times faintly nauseating — highly unorthodox, intensely claustrophobic, yet strangely endearing. It feels like walking into the home of a slightly unsettling neighbour with a search warrant in hand. You see everything you perhaps shouldn’t — from bedside drawers to hidden rooms you didn’t expect. You think it’s all jars and curios until something shifts, and suddenly you’re confronted with fragments of a life you don’t quite understand. And, oddly enough, you leave feeling a flicker of sympathy.
The museum is tucked beneath The Last Tuesday Society, packed to the brim with curiosities. From unicorn skulls to mummified cats, two-headed lambs to all manner of the bizarre, this place feels almost without boundaries, a cabinet of everything strange, unsettling and fascinating.
I can’t quite recall what stayed with me the most, only that I saw things I never imagined I would.
With love x