This Mare Street curiosity shop is both on the art circuit and purposefully off the main path. It is located between Vyner Street and the Andrews Road gallery district. If you look through the windows, you’ll see a world where The Mighty Boosh or velvet-clad Victorians might live. A wunderkammer of shells, skulls, taxidermy specimens, and other oddities can be seen when one enters the store, which also serves as the spiritual home of the Last Tuesday Society, a group of esotericists. The first-floor gallery is dedicated to art, although naturally, exhibitions lean toward the unsettlingly weird.

William James formed the Last Tuesday Society in 1873 at Harvard, and it was introduced to London as a “pataphysical organisation” in the fall of 2006 by the chancellor Viktor Wynd and the provost David Piper. Prior to achieving its goal of becoming a non-profit with full charitable status, the society is governed as a tolerable dictatorship by Chancellor Viktor Wynd. The society is committed to subverting life, the cosmos, and everything; it aims to create a new world filled with beauty, wonder, and the imagination with a dizzying array of events and exhibitions across the nation, from recreations of Victorian seances, complete with ectoplasm in a Cornish quarry, to Literary Dinners & Salons at The Cafe Royal, Whitechapel Art Gallery and Bistrotheque, masquerade and Halloween balls with thousands of attendees, and Wyndstock. 2008 saw the opening of their own building at 11 Mare Street in Hackney, which included a curiosity shop called “Viktor Wynd’s Little Shop of Horrors” in the basement and an art gallery called “Viktor Wynd Fine Art” on the ground floor.

The Last Tuesday Society announced the opening of London’s first comprehensive museum since the Horniman in 1901. No attempt is made at classification or comprehensiveness; rather, the museum concentrates on the pre-enlightenment origins of the museum as Wunderkabinett – a mirror to a world so infused with miracles and beauty that any attempt at categorisation is doomed to fail. The Museum will present an incoherent vision of the world displayed through wonder contained within a small space. This museum will only display everything that is there, unlike contemporary museumology, which hides 90% of a collection, attempts to educate and explain, and attempts to organise the world into tidy little labelled drawers under the dictates of an obscurantist elite establishment that has repeatedly proven itself wrong throughout history. This elite establishment is obsessed with a pedantic overspecialization of so-called “knowledge” that means little or nothing to anyone outside of its narrow little field and oft debunked metanarratives. From rare, priceless scientific and natural wonders like Dodo Bones or Speculum to the intriguing beauty of McDonald’s Happy Meal Toys, from old master etchings to prison inmates’ and crazy women’s doodles, occultists’ paintings, and pop art prints, to the horrors and wonders of nature, including two-headed kittens and living coral.