I’m an old-fashioned cove at heart and generally believe that things were much better in the past. My taste in museums is no exception. To me, a museum should be an Aladd-in’s cave of wonder and discovery – exotic specimens staring out from behind glass, queer objects of obscure purpose on display for their own intrinsic interest. The setting is as important as the collection it contains. A museum doesn’t feel like a museum unless it’s old. 

There’s been a disheartening trend in modern museums for a clinical whiteness more familiar in hospitals. Stuffed animals and historic esoterica give way to interactive computer displays and Disneyesque animatronics. Fortunately, there are a handful of more individual-istic museums that buck this trend – the Natural History Museum at Tring and the wonderful little museum at Illfracombe, Devon, are two that spring to mind. The greatest of all, of course, was the late, lamented Potter’s Museum of Curiosities. Unique, in so much as its main purpose was to entertain rather than educate, this collection of Victor-ian whimsy is best remembered for its tableaux of stuffed animals variously playing cricket, getting married, sitting in schoolrooms and playing on swings. However, it was the other items that caught my interest: the preserved head of a man-eating crocodile from India displayed next to a model church made entirely from feathers, that in turn sat next to a Maori battle-axe. None of the objects were obviously connected, but all were fascinating. 

The museum closed for good in 2003 and the collection was broken up and sold for a total of £500,000 (see FT168:10–11; 177:4–6; 270:5). It was a dark day in the history of museums. One can’t help but feel that had Potter’s been a collection of unmade beds or empty rooms with the lights going on and off, there would have been a huge outcry from Britain’s chattering classes and a serious bid to save the collection. As it was, Potter’s treasures were cast to the four winds with little fanfare or media attention. 

After years of lamenting the passing of Potter’s, I heard of something remarkably like it existing in the unlikely locat-ion of Hackney, east London. Apparently, it was a collection of wonderful and esoteric objects displayed in a building that served as both a museum and a shop. I had to investigate. 

The Little Shop of Horrors is located at 11 Mare Street, London E8. The shop front (The Last Tuesday Society) looks fairly normal from a distance; it’s only after you’ve opened the door that this changes. Even before the museum proper is reached, a cornu-copia of the curious explodes into the visitor’s vision. Stuffed fruit bats dangle from the ceiling, and the room is dominated by the vast, impressive fossilised skull of an auroch, a gigantic, extinct species of cattle. Other treats include a stuffed mermaid (possibly a Japanese Ningyo), preserved crows and rats in various poses and accurate, life-sized models of sea pigs (genus Scotoplanes). 

A flight of stairs leads the visitor down into what might just be the most wonderful collection of strange objects ever assembled under one roof, the modern equivalent of some 17th-century kunstkammer, a collection of objects assembled at a whim on the basis of their æsthetic or historical appeal with little to link one wonder to another and no attempt at explanation. The objects are assembled simply for their own intrinsic interest or grotesque appeal. 

The Little Shop is the brainchild of collector and proprietor Viktor Wynd, and this was precisely his intention: “I wanted to see how a contemporary wunderkammer might look,” he says. Was it meant to be a sort of successor to the late, lamented Potter’s Museum of Curiosities? 

“I think we’re more of an homage to childhood memories of the Pitt Rivers, the Horniman Museum and the John Soane Museum,” he says, “Although in my mind it’s really a miniature version of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, or Peter the Great’s cabinet of curiosities.” 

So we find a collection of skulls from the victims of Dayak head hunters in Borneo, some dating back to the 12th century. The oldest human skull in the shop is a partially fossilised 10,000-year-old specimen from Papua New Guinea, with a section missing where the fatal axe met the bone. 

Just as impressive is one of only two shrunken heads of a Caucasian in Europe. No one knows who the moustachioed white man was, a missionary or an explorer, but he met his end in Ecuador over 100 years ago. Now his scalp and face, shrunken with hot sand, sit in a jar, eyes and mouth sewn shut. Many of the exhibits remind us of our own mortality – perhaps none more so than the preserved erect penis of a man hanged 300 years ago. 

For me, as a cryptozoologist, the leg bones of a dodo formed one of the most interesting exhibits. Viktor kindly allowed me to hold one of these prec-ious items. It’s shocking to realise that not only did mankind wipe out the dodo in less than a century, but not a single preserved specimen exists – all we have are fragments. No wonder the poor creature has become synonymous with extinction.

Other highlights include the skeleton of infant Siamese twins, a six-legged lamb (rescued from the Potter’s carve-up) and a box reputed to contain some of the original darkness that Moses called down upon the Earth (nailed tightly shut, I’m glad to say). 

Strange conjunctions abound: mediæval bells from Albania sit next to a box of condoms used by the Rolling Stones (one hopes that only unused ones remain); fossil mammoth teeth lie alongside tomes with comically lewd titles such as Sex Tips for Irish Farmers and The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories. 

I love this sense of quite hetero-geneous objects being placed together, which harks back to a more eccentric age of museums; why, I ask Viktor, is it now so rare to find collections displayed in this way? 

“Every generation looks for a different narrative and assembles objects in a different way to tell a different story,” he says. “The people who run public museums are dull, boring, ordinary people living dull, boring lives; institutionally they have to be, in order to justify their worth to ever more distant quangos of like-minded people, and thus they like the narratives to reflect their own lives.” 

As well as the Little Shop of Horr-ors, Viktor Wynd is also the man behind The Last Tuesday Society, which puts on talks and throws decadent masques and parties. “It’s a pataphysical organisation founded by William James at Harvard in 1878 and seeks to create a more beautiful, interesting world,” he tells me. Membership is by invitation only, “but if you come to some of our events and meet other members and get on with them then you may be invited to join.” 

The hour or so I’d set aside to visit the Little Shop of Horrors proved hopelessly inadequate. One could probably drop in a hundred times and always find something new and enthralling, and I’d urge all fellow forteans to make a pilgrimage to this wonderful collection. Amazingly, the Little Shop of Horrors is just that – a shop as well as a museum. Most of the items are for sale, although I didn’t enquire as to the prices; no doubt, they would be well beyond the meagre budget of a monster-hunter! 

But isn’t it a wrench to let these treasures go? I asked Viktor. 

“They’re all my children really, so, yes, it’s sad – but in a way I’m happy to see them getting married. Some of them I love too much to ever part with, but I’m feeding my collecting habit – things need to go so I can acquire more. Come back in 50 years and see what we have then…” 

Little Shop of Horrors, 11 Mare Street, London E8.