A new exhibition has opened at the Household Cavalry Museum, celebrating members’ of the Household Cavalry’s participation in the Olympic Games since 1908.

Five Olympic medals and an Olympic torch from 1996 are among the items on display.

You can see the Olympic exhibition, along with the permanent displays about the history and role of the Household Cavalry, and take a peep into the working stables until 17 June. After that, the museum closes for the Olympic Beach Volleyball competition and will re-open in October.

The Household Cavalry Museum is on Horse Guards, London SW1. It costs around £6 to enter, and you can book tickets here

One of the best of these is the Dickens and London exhibition at the Museum of London.

Visit, and you’ll see paintings, photographs, costumes and objects illustrating the world Dickens lived in and captured brilliantly in his books. Don’t miss the chance to check out Dickens’s rarely seen hand-written manuscripts, which will also be on display.

This Christmas, we’re offering you the chance to win two tickets to the exhibition, and, to make your experience a memorable one, we’re throwing in a night’s stay at the gorgeous Art Deco Thistle Hotel in Marble Arch. As well as staying in an Executive room, you can enjoy breakfast and dinner in the Marmor Grill.

Enter now for your chance to win this fantastic Dickens prize!

Cross-dressing potter Grayson Perry has taken over part of the British Museum for his new exhibition, The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman. When I was invited along to a private view, I wasn’t sure what to expect.

Perry introduced the show, saying that it was “a lifetime’s ambition, a chance to find myself in the museum”, adding “I hope people see the museum through my eyes”.

The exhibition features new work by Perry, including a magnificent tapestry; a customised motorbike complete with teddy bear, described by Perry as “a harsh ride” due to its lack of suspension; and a vase representing the different reasons people visit the British Museum (“I wandered in” and “I came to be outraged”).

Interspersed between Perry’s works are objects from the British Museum collection specially selected by the artist, from ancient badges collected by pilgrims, to a phallic statue that was believed to bring good luck.

At the centre of the exhibition is a splendid coffin ship, a memorial to all the unnamed craftsmen that have created objects housed in the British Museum.

“It’s Grayson’s appropriation of the whole of the museum to frame his creative work,” explained British Museum director Neil MacGregor. “It’s something nobody has done before.”

Speaking to a crowd of trendy Frieze Art Fair patrons, Perry seemed far more excited by the prospect of school kids enjoying the show than he was about the opinions of art critics and dealers. “I’ve heard that the average age of visitors is 12,” he said with glee.

This down-to-earth attitude has made Perry popular among the museum’s staff. According to MacGregor, “no curator in the museum has won more affection than Grayson”.

So that’s two reasons why you should visit the exhibition: it’s a fascinating show created by a thoroughly nice chap.

Grayson Perry: The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman is at the British Museum until 19 February 2012

This exquisite collection of over 70 portraits celebrates the golden Hollywood era and the Hollywood stars that captivated the world between the 1920s and the 1960s and beyond.  

They were part of the infamous star system that large film studios like MGM had in place and their images were strictly controlled by these studios. 

Image was of the upmost importance and the portraits convey the fascination and god-like appeal of these stars.  It is perhaps because of these images that they became such celebrated stars. 

There are  many included such as Clark Gable, Marlene Dietrich, James Dean and Audrey Hepburn to name just a few. The collection is immense and fabulous.

I especially loved the portraits of Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly and James Stewart, having never seen them before.  It’s amazing to think that there are still unseen images of these icons and the beautiful vintage prints will surprise many.

It is a truly incredible collection which shows the importance of the photographer in the making of these stars resulting in images which forever capture the elegance and glamour of its day.

Glamour of the Gods at the National Portrait Gallery, until 23 Oct 2011. Book tickets

The new exhibition at the British Library is subtitled “Science Fiction but not as you know it” and aims to demonstrate the genre’s often overlooked breadth and depth.

Breadth is represented by the range of authors, including writers from 2nd century Roman Empire to 21st century China by way of the Brontë sisters, and topics, everything from first contact with aliens to the end of the world, from cyberpunk to steampunk. Depth comes from the examination of such themes as what it means to be human and how we relate to the universe around us and the technology we use.

The emphasis is on the written word – mostly prose fiction but also graphic novels, comic books, manga and poetry – with original authors’ manuscripts sitting alongside mass-market editions. There are film clips and science fiction inspired music, and should you be inspired, or just think you can do better, you can design your own alien.

In the middle of the exhibition you’ll  find a TARDIS , which when added to the one at the Doctor Who Experience, the one at the The London Film Museum and the real police box at Earl’s Court means London must currently be a nexus in the space-time continuum. Or something like that.

Science fiction fans and newcomers alike will come away with a lengthy list of books they want to read.

Out of this World is on at the British Library until 25 September 2011. Free admission to the exhibition itself. Tickets to the surrounding programme of talks and screenings are £7.50, £5.00 concessions.

During the swinging 60s, the understated traditional suits of Savile Row were considered boring and the fashionable flocked to menswear boutiques on Carnaby Street for brightly coloured suits and shirts. When Nutters of Savile Row opened in 1969, the two worlds collided. Rock stars, artists and the stylish embraced Nutter’s bespoke suits because they were fashionable as well as beautifully crafted.

The exhibition includes suits, jackets, sketches and a couple of pieces of knitwear. Some of the suits are very much of their time, made from velvet or satin, with flares and flouncy trim. They are the sort of outfits worn by celebs on those old episodes of Morecombe and Wise. But the Fashion & Textile Museum understands the zeitgeist and these suits feel unexpectedly fresh and exciting.

As well as fans of fashion, tailoring and style, this exhibition is also perfect for music fans as suits have been loaned by stars like Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts, Cilla Black and Elton John. Nutter made astonishing jumpsuits for Elton’s 80s tours, as well as a coral flared jumpsuit for Neil Sedaka which is amusingly 70s. It says a lot about Nutter’s star-attracting style that one of The Beatles turned up at the exhibition’s private view last night. (Ringo! Very exciting.)

Admission also includes entry to a small photography exhibition of work by Justin De Villeneuve featuring Twiggy at the legendary London department store Biba.

Tommy Nutter is on at the Fashion and Textile Museum from 20 May to 22 October 2011. Adult £8, concessions £5. www.ftmlondon.org

Here’s a great video from CNN about Ai Weiwei’s art in London.

There are currently two Ai Weiwei shows on display in the capital: one at the Lisson Gallery in Marylebone, the other at Somerset House.

Have you seen either exhibition? If you have, send us your thoughts in the comments below.

The Museum of London has a new exhibition dedicated to Street Photography opening tomorrow. I went along for an early preview this morning, and was lucky enough to look around the show with the museum’s Senior Curator of Photographs, Mike Seaborne.

The show is divided into sections by date, beginning with the very earliest shots of streets in London from around 1860, and taking us right up to present day.

Through the ages, you can see the rise in press photography between 1890 and 1920, some incredible pictures of London during the Blitz, and the development of a more abstract expressionism in photography in the post-war period. The theme of photography as documentary runs through the exhibition, whether it’s an attempt to capture “life as it is”, or a more deliberate effort to record social hardships, cultural shifts and the evolution of London.

While I couldn’t get curator Mike Seaborne to decide on a favourite image, he did point out a few of his highlights. Two, by Horace Nicholls, that he “found” while searching the archives almost look like photographic nods to Renoir paintings, they’re so beautiful. “I didn’t know we had any images by this photographer. They’d actually been wrongly attributed,” Seaborne explains. “I’d seen one in the National Media Museum, so I recognised these immediately. They’re very important examples of photography of the time.” Other favourites of Seaborne’s are by the German photographer and documentary filmmaker Lutz Dille. The incredibly striking portraits are a fantastic snapshot of life in London in the early 1960s.

Seaborne admits to having the edit the museum’s archive of photography “very savagely” for the exhibition. “We’ve really cut down on the contemporary section. The contemporary photos don’t have the same social concerns of those in the 1930s. The nature of documentary has changed: literally everyone with an iphone can do it now.”

There certainly is a very different “feel” to the later part of the exhibition. It’s as though, once colour is introduced, my response to the photos changes: these pictures are more familiar, perhaps less political than the previous shots. What they certainly capture perfectly is the changing nature of photography. As Seaborne points out, everyone’s at it these days.

In fact, the Museum of London is offering you the chance to win an iPad. Just take your own street photography scene and upload the image to their flickr album. Don’t forget to check out the excellent, free exhibition first for some inspiration!

London Street Photography is at the Museum of London until 4 September. As previously mentioned, the exhibition, along with the museum, is free.

Today a new exhibition opens at the Wellcome Collection looking at drugs. High Society is a typical show for the Wellcome: attending a preview yesterday, I found the idiosyncratic splicing of art, literature, medicine, social history and anthropology I’ve come to expect from the institution.

High Society’s claim is that every society is a high society: your early morning coffee is no different to drinking kava in the Pacific, chewing betel nuts in Asia, or coca leaves in the Andes. Time and geography produce different substances, but the use of drugs in society is universal, everyday, and stretches back through history.

And the very first display case sets the scene perfectly. Alongside a crude 21st-century crack pipe is an intricately carved pair of betel nut cutters from 19th-century India, and Chilean trays for hallucinogenic snuff dating back as far as 400AD.

Later, you can see an opium ball, about the same size as a baby’s head, from the 19th century; Mervyn Peake’s Caterpillar illustration from “Alice in Wonderland”; and bronze crack-pipe sculptures by Keith Coventry. There’s syringes, laudanum bottles, photos of magic mushrooms, NHS pamphlets for parents worried about drugs. And work by Dante Gabriel Rosetti, the original manuscripts of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas de Quincey, a note on Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes craving “mental exultation” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan.

Highlights for me included the incredibly modern-looking lithograph “Morphinomane” from 1897 by Eugène Grasset: pain and anguish stretch through the girl’s face as she drives a needle into her thigh. Delightfully silly is a coloured aquatint entitled “Doctor and Mrs Syntax with a party of friends, experimenting with laughing gas”. Tracey Moffat’s hauntingly bleak “Laudanum” series of big, black and white photographs certainly make an impression. And the Joshua Light Show by Joshua White makes for a delightfully trippy museum moment.

Altering one’s mental state is a universal impulse, the exhibition suggests. The following sections, dedicated to Apothecary to Laboratory (tracing the history of early folk remedies to the garden shed where Alexander Shulgin made MDMA, or ecstasy), Collective Intoxication (looking at communal drug taking), and The Drugs Trade (mainly examining the Opium Wars) seeks to gently alter your state of mind about drugs as a whole.

Later, placing Prohibition posters alongside what modern society deems to be “harder” or “illegal” drugs poses many questions. The final section, called  A sin, a crime, a vice or a disease? after a quote by the British doctor Norman Kerr in 1884, doesn’t seek to find answers, and you’re sure to leave this thought-provoking exhibition with the issues High Society raises whirling in your mind.

High Society is at the Wellcome Collection until 27 February. Look out for the brilliant-sounding High Society Events Programme. More exhibits from the show can be see on The Guardian website.

There’s a brand new permanent gallery opening at London’s Imperial War Museum on Friday: the Lord Ashcroft Gallery. Yesterday, I went along for a sneak preview.

Tucked away on the fourth floor of the museum, visiting the Lord Ashcroft Gallery feels a bit like  climbing into the loft of a big old house. And the incredible personal stories, medals, diaries, old comics and items of clothing only serve to feed the feeling you’re exploring a wonderful attic room.

The basis for Extraordinary Heroes is Lord Ashcroft’s collection of Victoria Crosses – medals given for acts of extreme bravery carried out under direct enemy fire. The collection of 164 awards, which date from the Crimean War to the Falklands War, are on display alongside 48 Victoria Crosses already held by the museum. There are also 31 George Crosses (medals given for extreme bravery in peacetime, and in wartime away from battle) in the exhibition.

The medals themselves are striking: the colourful ribbons and display cases highlight the fact that these are incredibly special items. But it’s the stories behind the medals that really come to life in this exhibition.

The Extraordinary Heroes display has been laid out in seven themes:

• Aggression
• Boldness
• Endurance
• Initiative
• Leadership
• Sacrifice
• Skill

Rather than creating a timeline of medals, this display acknowledges that incredible bravery through endurance deserved the same recognition in the 1800s as it does today.

As Nigel Steel, the principal historian on the gallery project told The Telegraph, “We are trying to create a space in which people can think about courage.

“There may be different types of bravery but the one thing in common about the people commemorated here is that they had a choice. They could have gone the other way and looked after themselves but they chose not to.”

And this exhibition is more than a set of medals in cases. Innovative boxes, listening posts, video, interactive touch-screens, comic books and transcribed diaries and letters all work together to create a really immersive experience, and mean this is a display that’ll appeal to the whole family.

So, alongside the medals, you can see the ripped backpack worn by Lance Corporal Matt Croucher GC. When he tripped a wire in a Taliban bomb factory in 2008, Croucher threw himself and his backpack onto the grenade, smothering its explosion, and saving his and his comrades’ lives. You can also see the diving suit worn by Acting Leading Seaman James Magennis in his VC action, setting mines in 1945. And the goggles worn by Sergeant Thomas Mottershead VC in 1917.

Children (and adults!) will enjoy “collecting” seven medals, one for each of the themes, by stamping a paper medal in an extraordinary hero treasure hunt.

I loved the little hand-written notes on some of the cases “Only 18″, “Beating the Blitz”, and “Dr VC” – they made me feel as though I was sharing in a really well-loved, personal collection.

It’s the focus on the personal that makes this gallery well worth a visit. I suggest anyone who might be less interested in the big impersonal bits of machinery in the main gallery of the Imperial War Museum heads to this fantastic “attic space” and enjoy a few quieter moments reflecting on the lives of some extraordinary people.

The Lord Ashcroft Gallery opens to the public on 12 November. Entrance to the Imperial War Museum is free. See more images at www.flickr.com/photos/zozo79/sets/72157625347732654/