Starting Point

What are you doing?
The plan is to visit every museum in London, in 2011.

Why?
Well, why not? At greater length:

• I've lived in London for years, and although I get out and about a reasonable amount I cant help but feel I should be doing a little more to make the most of (arguably) the world's greatest city.
• There are a very large number of museums in London - from the well known, great museums like the Natural History, British and V&A, to much more specialised ones around clockmaking, fans, type and so on. There's no definitive list (I'm trying to compile something close) but I think there are something like 150-200
• I might learn something. In fact, that's trite - of course I'll learn something, like the development of optics, or how naval warfare evolved over the years. So I'll obviously learn a bunch of 'stuff.' It's also possible I may learn some 'big' stuff, eternal truths and so on. Possibly. But not probable. But I can live in hope
• I live in London, so most of the museums should be easily and cheaply visitable. So less excuses for slacking out.

What do you define as a museum?
Good question. Until I started researching this, I hadn't really thought about it. Some are obvious - the British Museum for example. They have world-class immensely deep and priceless exhibits. However, there are a lot of smaller ones, most of them I've never heard of. Is there a line to be drawn? I think there is, so I've drawn one: basically, there must be a permanent exhibition of some sort. This nicely excludes Bond Street art galleries and the like, which are just there to sell the stuff on display. It doesn't exclude something like Madame Tussauds, which I really don't think is a proper museum, but I can't at the moment think of any way of getting out of standing in the sodding queue for hours and visiting the waxy emporium.

How many museums are there in London?
A lot. I hope to be able to answer that question some time later this year. My current guess is, something like 150-200.

What do you hope to find out?

• Is the museum in question 'good'?
• Is is worth visiting?
• Is it just a bunch of stuff in a room, or are there broader and deeper themes? Does it tell us anything useful about humanity, history and so on?
• Whats the cafe like?
• What are the toilets like?
• Does it attract specific sorts of oddballs?
• And so on...

I'm not going to be reviewing each museum, as such...but it will be a review of a sort. Quirky, quixotic perhaps, but don't expect comprehensive. Lets face it, some of these places are 100s of years old, and have enormous collections run by teams of highly knowledgeable specialists - I'm not going to be able to do them much justice after a couple of hours and a cream tea.