Saturday 30 May 2009

Story of London: selected free exhibitions

With the Story of London month about to start, here are some of its free exhibitions with a history focus.

City Hall includes two which should be worth a look. London Through a Lens is a selection of photographs from the Hutton Archive. It's not clear from the information currently online, but if this is the exhibition previously at the Getty Images Gallery (and in the Time Out book of the same name) then it's well worth a look. In the lobby is Port of London Authority - a century of service.

Another potentially interesting collection of photographs is 100 London Faces at Teasmith in Spitalfields. It features portraits of 100 Londoners, aged 1 to 100, who were also asked to reveal a secret or something unusual about themselves. (Presumably the one-year-old didn't say much!)

Here in Deptford there will also be a photographic exhibition, by twelve young volunteers who are photographing 36 heritage sites in the Borough. A booklet will be produced to accompany it.

For art history, try The Whitechapel Boys at the recently-reopened Whitechapel Gallery. This group of Jewish artists and writers met at the Whitechapel Library at the beginning of the twentieth century. Educational history is covered by Images and Documents from Chelsea and Queen Elizabeth Colleges, 1895-1985 at King's College London.

Finally, if you're not Henry VIII-ed out yet, visit the Richmond Museum for Henry and his father Henry VII in Richmond, or the Honeywood Museum in Sutton for Henry VIII and Nicholas Carew of Beddington - from friendship to execution.

These are just a small selection of the exhibitions available: for a full list including those with admission fees, art, and contemporary London life, visit the Story of London events pages. For a selection of the most interesting events, see the IanVisits events calendar.

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