SECRET MUSEUM (London)

For 11 days only, in a secret central London location, Museum of Homelessness is sharing the truths of 2020 from the perspective of activists, community organisers and people who live at the sharp edge of inequality. These people, who make up our community, have donated objects and stories of their experiences of 2020 to make our Secret Museum. 

This FREE event invites you into a world of solidarity and underground organising, where the collective aim has been to save lives and uphold the rights of the community.

This immersive Secret Museum experience, lasting one and a half hours, will go beyond the headlines of 2020, and reveal to audiences what happened to people on the margins during the pandemic.

We are opening our Secret Museum exactly 18 months after the “Everyone In” project launched – the government scheme to bring people who are homeless into hotels.

But the truth is much more complicated than the soundbites you hear on homelessness. It can also be inconvenient, and some prefer it not to be shared. Narratives get told for us, all too often, and it’s hard to know what to believe.

Founder Jess Turtle said

“Secret Museum is secret because, in the current political climate, there are many challenges to keeping tomorrow’s history safe and sound. Time to move beyond the confusion. Secret Museum will set the record straight.”

Secret Museum is funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund as part of our Reframe the Narrative project.

What can people expect?

If you sign up, we’ll send you a special pack with instructions about where in central London to start your experience. You will be joining our Homeless Taskforce crew and your mission will be to find the Secret Museum.

You’ll journey through the streets where we and many others worked 7 days a week in a deserted city. En route, you’ll find clues and signs hidden in the fabric of the city to lead you to the Secret Museum.

The clues and signs are traces and echoes of the objects and stories that have been given to Museum of Homelessness by our community.

These will lead you to the venue where we’re keeping the real objects safe and sound. We’ll be waiting to welcome you and share these precious stories.

Sounds weird, right? Just like the pandemic has been, right? Don’t worry, you won’t be alone, you’ll be part of a group. Unlike the isolation of the recent past, we want this to be a shared experience of people coming together to make stuff happen, away from screens.

How to book

People can sign-up for Secret Museum here Secret Museum – Museum of Homelessness

Dates are available between October 27th and November 6th.

Secret Museum is a pay what you can event, people can make a contribution at the end of the experience if they are able.

About Museum of Homelessness

Museum of Homelessness is an award-winning charity and museum, setup in 2015 and based in London. Our work is driven by people with direct experience of homelessness, many of whom have experience hate and discrimination in their lives. We do not have our own building and work in a range of ways carrying out creative work, campaigning and investigations. Past creative productions have included Objectified at Manchester Art Gallery and State of the Nation at Tate Modern.

During the pandemic we launched the COVID-19 homeless taskforce to respond directly to the need of our community. Secret Museum has been borne out of the experiences of people we work closely with and is part of Reframe the Narrative, a heritage project exploring the legacy of the pandemic supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Founders of MoH Jess and Matt Turtle available for interview.

jess@museumofhomelessness.org

matt@museumofhomelessness.org

www.museumofhomelessness.org