BORIS JOHNSON wants the Met to open up its ‘Black’ Museum to the general public.


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“There is a huge opportunity for us,” said Johnson. “The police have a fantastic reservoir of cultural material.”

Currently housed somewhere deep inside New Scotland Yard, the museum holds artefacts relating to some of the most gruesome and notorious crimes in London’s modern history, including material on Jack the Ripper, Dr Crippen and the bathroom in which Dennis Nielsen hid dead bodies.

Until now, the authorities had deemed all this too strong for our stomachs, but the Mayor has encouraged a change of heart and some exhibits are now set to be included in a new Blue Light Museum, which will include famous artefacts from the two other emergency services.

“To be quite truthful, some of the items are just too gruesome for members of the public, but if we had a Black Museum, we would have tourists queuing around the corner,” said Brian Coleman, chair of the London Fire service, who is working on the project.

Among the exhibits likely to go on show are a case equipped with poison darts once owned by the Kray twins, the umbrella used to kill Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in 1978 and the uniform worn by PC Keith Blakelock, who was murdered in the Broadwater Farm riot in 1985.

Johnson’s scheme has the support of at least one influential personage, in the shape of former Met Police Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman, who dubbed it “the Madame Tussauds of the Yard”.

“This museum presents such well-kept artefacts of significant historical value it seems a shame the general public do not have the opportunity to have this experience,” he said.