On Friday a colleague from Vintage Classics, our ever helpful work experience and I headed to Foyles Charing Cross armed with our tape measures, a hammer and some stunning prints to hang a new exhibition.  Foyles kindly donated the space for two weeks as part of our Dickens celebrations with Vintage.

Hanging the exhibition was more complicated and involved way more maths than we realised.  More than once we scrambled for paper and pen to work out correct measurements but in the end we manage to get all the images hung straight (well almost all) and with all our thumbs intact. 

deciding on the order…

measuring…

making sure it is straight…

hammers away…

The exhibition is divided into two parts; the first exhibits some of the more spectacular images of Victorian London from our Museum of London tie-in book Dickens’s Victorian London.  Taken from the Museum’s archive, the images chronicle life in the city as the writer knew it.  From landmarks such as the Houses of Parliament and St Paul’s Cathedral to the slums and coaching inns, the markets and the Thames, these images take us on a memorable and haunting journey through the streets of the capital during the Victorian era.

The second part of the exhibition comes from Vintage Classics, in association with the Guardian, who launched a nationwide photography competition to imagine how Oliver Twist’s world would look now.  The winning photograph will feature on the cover of a new edition of the novel published in April and along with two other finalists make up the other half of our Dickens exhibition.

The exhibition is now open to the public and will be available to view until Friday 2nd March 2012 but if you can’t make it just check out a copy of Dickens’s Victorian London and look out for Vintage’s new edition of Oliver Twist in April 2012.

Kasi - Press Officer