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Museum of London

The Museum of London tells the story of London, its social, political and technological development. We seek to engage our visitors in issues to do with urban living and to stretch thinking through our academic outputs. We have a strong environmental policy and are interested in urban development and sustainability of cities. Through this consideration we deploy many areas of thought; science, geography, economics, social history, archaeology, history of medicine as well as art. We have extensive collections which demonstrate the technological advances of the city, including the areas of transport, communications, energy and medicine. Particularly it is through our human remains collection, our archaeology and or programming that we engage with science. As an example of our activities In 2012/13 the Museum of London staged Doctors, Dissection & Resurrection Men an exhibition which discussed the topic of medical developments, science policy and personal ethics via the story of the demand and supply of cadavers. We worked with a number of science-based organisations such as the Wellcome Collection and the Royal College of Surgeons and engaged our visitors in current ethical issues to do with donating bodies to science. Our style is to present evidence in this case we used skeletal remains from our archaeological collection. Our collections contain 17,000 human bodies which have been excavated in London from pre-history to 1832. This collection comprises our Centre for Human Bioarchaeology it is a key resource to scientists who visit it from all over the world to study impacts of such things as disease and mortality. The collection represents one of the world’s most comprehensive records of humans over time from one place. Through our archaeological archive (the largest in the world) we have a record of the development of London; over 1 million items excavated from London tell a compelling story. We actively promote archaeology regularly undertaking citizen-digs so as to engage people in the actual process of discovery and the methodology of identification and classification. Using the current interest in archaeology we are able to engage people in the scientific methods of the discipline, encouraging discovery and analysis at the amateur level. Future Cities – is a topic that the Museum of London considers and is integrally associated with science, technology, environment, culture, policy, architecture, at this time of mega-urbanisation this is an issue that is of high import to the majority of people living on this planet. With London as our main focus many of the issues facing modern world societies can be discussed through an inter-disciplinary discourse and by engaging those who inhabit, experience and contribute to its development.