Hackney Dark Art Gallery, £4 Thursdays: Viktor Wynd Museum

The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & Natural History sits in a basement under an absinthe bar at 11 Mare Street, London E8 4RP, and it is the closest thing Hackney has to a dark art gallery near me answer. Adult entry to the Wunderkabinett costs £12, concessions pay £8, and Thursday walk-ins pay just £4. Each ticket buys thirty minutes downstairs among two-headed kittens, occult drawings and mummified fairies.

The museum grew out of The Last Tuesday Society, a club founded at Harvard in 1873 by the philosopher William James. Viktor Wynd and David Piper brought it to London as a pataphysical organisation in autumn 2006. They opened their own premises on Mare Street in 2008, and after a Kickstarter campaign converted the space into a museum that opened on Halloween 2014. The society calls it the country's only curiosity museum and the first all-encompassing museum to open in London since the Horniman in 1901.

Upstairs, The Absinthe Parlour took on Allison Crawbuck and Rhys Everett as directors in 2016, and in 2019 it was voted Best Bar in London at the seventh Design My Night Awards. That split explains the whole visit. The ground floor is a free-to-enter bar and gallery hung with strange pictures, while the paid Wunderkabinett waits down a tight staircase, packed so densely that a single shelf can hold a dodo bone beside a McDonald's Happy Meal toy.

This is where the dark art gallery label earns itself. The Spare Room holds what the museum describes as the largest public display of work by Austin Osman Spare anywhere, the occultist painter whose spirit drawings shaped twentieth-century magical art. Nearby, the Gnostic Temple of Agape is a fully functioning occult temple rather than a stage set. Paintings, drawings and prints crowd every gap between the vitrines, so the room reads like an outsider art salon that someone filled with bones.

The natural history side leans macabre. The museum bills itself as the largest public display of animal monsters in the UK, from a two-headed kitten to an eight-legged lamb. Look for the mummified fairies Wynd says an old Irish lady gave him, the leg bone of an Irish giant, a mummified mermaid's hand, a striped unicorn's head and Tessa Farmer's tiny fairy sculptures. The scrying shelf adds an obsidian mirror, a jar of moles, a mandrake root and a spirit basket from Papua New Guinea.

Until 8 November 2026 the temporary room shows The Occult Temple of Agape, a survey of the magickal worlds of the artist Rufus White. From 12 November 2026 to 28 February 2027 it switches to Lascar, a show of the art and ephemera of Stephen Tennant, the aristocratic aesthete remembered as the man who stayed in bed. Philip Hoare launches his biography Serious Pleasures at the museum on the same November evening, so that opening night will be busier than usual.

The events calendar is the reason regulars come back. Paul Gambino talks about the Victorian obsession with mourning and death on 26 October, and Viktor Wynd tells dark fairy tales from around the world on 9 November before leading his own guided tour on 10 November. Vadim Kosmos runs tours on 25 October and 29 November, Wicked Wednesdays brings tarot readings on 4 November, and Macabre Martinis with Alice Lascelles and Millie Milliken fills the bar on 23 November.

The Wunderkabinett is small, and the museum asks visitors to book online through Eventbrite to guarantee a slot. Arrive within fifteen minutes of your ticket time, because the clock starts anyway. Online tickets are fully refundable up to 24 hours before. Saturday is the busiest day and staff warn of a wait even with a booking, so a weekday afternoon is calmer. The £4 Thursday price only applies to walk-ins, which suits a spontaneous detour.

The museum keeps its own hours, which differ from the bar above. The Wunderkabinett runs Tuesday to Friday from 3pm to 10pm and Saturday and Sunday from noon to 10pm, with last admission at 10pm and no Monday opening. The venue is sometimes hired out on weekdays for filming or private events, which is when a call to 020 8533 5297 saves a wasted trip east. Children under 16 pay £2.50 before 5pm.

Expect a mix you rarely see in one room. Couples on a second date squeeze past art students sketching a taxidermy head, and tarot regulars drift down after a Wicked Wednesday reading. Under-18s are allowed in only before 5pm with a parent or guardian, so evenings are strictly adult. Dogs are not permitted in the parlour or the museum. Admission includes a free cup of tea on request, which is a quiet kindness after half an hour of skulls.

An honest verdict. Thirty minutes is enough to see everything once but not to read every label, so pick a theme and skip the rest. The occult corner and the Spare drawings reward slow looking far more than the cabinet of novelty taxidermy, which most people photograph and forget. Leave the absinthe cocktails for after your slot rather than before. The staircase is steep and narrow, and the room gets warm when a full group is downstairs.

Mare Street runs north from Cambridge Heath towards Hackney Central, and the museum makes a good opening stop on it. Walk about fifteen minutes north to Hackney Empire at 291 Mare Street, the Frank Matcham music hall from 1901, where a pantomime or comedy night keeps the theatrical mood going. To the south, Hackney City Farm at 1a Goldsmiths Row sits beside Haggerston Park and has pigs, goats and a cafe that suits families who visited before 5pm.

If the Wunderkabinett is sold out, do not wait on the pavement. Book the next free slot online, take a drink in the free Absinthe Parlour in the meantime, or walk to Broadway Market for coffee and come back. On a wet Saturday the queue can stretch, and a later evening slot after 7pm is usually easier than arriving at noon with everyone else.

Address: The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & Natural History, 11 Mare Street, London E8 4RP. Phone: 020 8533 5297. Museum hours: Tuesday to Friday 3pm to 10pm, Saturday and Sunday noon to 10pm, closed Monday. Tickets: adults £12, concessions £8 (including guests with a bar reservation), children under 16 £2.50 before 5pm, and Thursday walk-ins £4. The Absinthe Parlour and its galleries are free to enter.

Ask the Karpo APP for a late table nearby or an East London plan around one of the November talks, and it can line up your slot, a drink and the walk home.