A museum exhibition in London is showing visitors something you can't see anywhere else in the city: real, preserved human bodies, stripped of skin and posed mid-stride, mid-swing or mid-thought. Body Worlds, the anatomy exhibition famous for its plastination technique, has set up in South Kensington — a part of the city already dense with big-hitting museums, which makes pairing it with the Natural History Museum or the V&A an easy day out.
The exhibition is the work of German anatomist Gunther von Hagens, who invented plastination, a process that replaces the water and fat in human tissue with polymers. The result: whole bodies and individual organs that don't decay and can be displayed, touched and studied up close. Donated by people who chose to leave their bodies to science, the specimens are arranged to show what lies beneath — muscles, nerves, blood vessels, organs — and, importantly, what happens when things go wrong. Displays compare a healthy lung with a smoker's lung, and show the toll of disease and lifestyle on the body in a way no textbook quite manages.
Expect whole-body poses that reveal the muscular system in dramatic detail, cross-sections of the human torso and brain, and chambers dedicated to specific systems: the nervous system spread out like a map, the circulatory system rendered in red polymer. It's science-heavy rather than sensational, though the sight of preserved bodies posed like athletes or dancers can be arresting — some visitors find it moving, others find it unsettling. Neither reaction is wrong.
Tickets are timed-entry and the exhibition has been popular, so booking ahead online is worth doing, especially for weekend slots. Plan on 60 to 90 minutes to get through it properly. Photography rules vary by venue, so check on the day, and be aware it may not suit very young children — some displays are graphic by nature.
For travellers, the appeal is practical as much as curiosity: it's an indoor, weather-proof activity in one of London's best-connected neighbourhoods. South Kensington station puts you within a few minutes' walk of the exhibition and two world-class museums that are free to enter, so you can build a full culture day without spending much beyond the ticket price and a coffee.
