Viktor Wynd’s Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & Unnatural History is the first museum of its type to open in London since 1901 when the Horniman Museum was founded. Inspired by the pre-Enlightenment concept of the “wunderkabinett”, it displays everything from dodo bones to McDonald’s Happy Meal Toys, from pop art prints to stuffed double-headed kittens – all of them objects that have caught the eye of its founder.

“By placing the rare and the beautiful on the same plane as the commonplace, banal and amusing,” Wynd writes, “this museum seeks not to educate but to subvert, to show the world not in a grain of sand, but in a Hackney basement. The museum has no overreaching aim beyond the theft of it’s visitors time and the hope that it will provide amusement by return & hopes to fill the vacuum between what the establishment elite believes is worthy of worship & what exists in the world.”

Viktor Wynd is an author, artist and curator who has staged exhibitions of work by Mervyn Peake, Leonora Carrington and others. His books include “Viktor Wynd’s Cabinet of Wonders” and, most recently, “Dark Fairy Tales: Stories From Around The World”. He also founded the events organisation, the Last Tuesday Society, which became known for its literary events, as well as its flamboyant halloween parties and masked balls.

Photo copyright Oskar Proctor.