City’s Beatles Story museum to move to 100,000 sq ft new home and official ownership, along with Yellow Submarine makeover of Liverpool’s second-tallest building
Liverpool is to unveil a new 100,000 sq ft visitor attraction about the Beatles, in plans hailed as “extraordinary” by Paul McCartney, and by Andy Burnham as having “the kind of ambition I want to see more of across Britain”.
Opening in 2028, the project is a huge upgrade for the Beatles Story, a museum which opened in Liverpool’s Royal Albert Dock in 1990. Ownership will now pass to the Beatles company Apple Corps, making the Beatles Story the band’s first official fan experience in their home city.
Inspired by a gothic cathedral partly built using human bones, this gleaming monument to recycling boasts 82,000 bricks derived from construction waste – following a two-day brick-making festival
Museums often try to reflect the world around them, but rarely are they made so literally of their surroundings as the new design museum in Ghent. Rising above the Belgian city’s medieval tiled rooftops like an angular white watchtower, the new building has vacuumed up the city’s condemned concrete frames, windows, car windscreens, sinks and old toilets, and transformed them, phoenix-like, into a gleaming monument to recycling.
“There’s nothing new about reuse,” says Andy Groarke, co-founder of Carmody Groarke, the London-based architects who designed the €20m (£17m) project with local firms Atama and Re-st. “We’ve just forgotten how to do it.”
From rent strikes to squatting, a new show reveals how people have managed to keep a roof over their head in London – and the mould and astronomical rents that persist
Charles Booth’s pioneering poverty maps of Victorian London show a vivid colour-coded warren of streets, alleyways and slums tightly packed together. Those marked black and dark blue were classed as being “very poor”, defined by “chronic want”. The light blue ones were poor – “18s to 21s a week for a moderate family”. Pink streets housed those who were “fairly comfortable”, and those where the wealthy lived were marked in yellow.
The maps by the British social reformer are the 19th-century equivalent of the modern-day indices of deprivation, which rank every geographic area of the UK by its level of social and economic disadvantage. Comparing the two shows how much has changed in the past 150 years – but also what hasn’t. Historical slums have been cleared away and housing conditions have generally improved, but extreme poverty and extreme wealth continue to live side by side in the capital.
There’s plenty that stands out at Regent’s Park this year, from antidepressant pens and an ibuprofen-dolling robotic arm to Miriam Cahn’s 26 years’ worth of self-portraiture and a 150m-year-old dinosaur skull – still with embedded tooth
The raised platform in the middle of British artist Ella Fleck’s installation vibrates under your feet to the sound of a male voice. He’s whispering sweet nothings, intoning sexual fantasies. It’s all based on third-party agencies that manage OnlyFans accounts, interacting with users, creating fictional relationships that horny guys spend thousands on. It’s a greasy, gross, uncomfortable exploration of sex work on an industrial scale.
Exclusive: Portsmouth Historic Dockyard’s new £15m permanent display tells tales of courage from conflicts such as Crimean and both world wars
They tell tales of bravery under fire, may lead to conversations about the UK’s place in the world and could prompt visitors to reflect on what they might have done if faced with the same perilous circumstances.
All 10 Victoria Crosses (VCs) awarded to members of the Royal Marines are going on display together for the first time along with tales of courage during conflicts such as the Crimean and both world wars.
The often-criticised pop artist is the focus of a monumental new survey including rarely seen pieces and ambitious new restagings at New York’s Whitney Museum
When the American artist Roy Lichtenstein created his monumental Greene Street Mural in 1983, he took inspiration from the Bayeux tapestry for its serial storytelling technique. But whereas the embroidery depicting the Norman conquest continues to delight after nearly 1,000 years, Lichtenstein’s site-specific mural was destroyed after six weeks, in accordance with his wishes.
More than four decades later, however, the monumental Greene Street Mural is to mesmerise art lovers once more. This week a 96ft (29-metre) recreation of the work will span the entire entryway to Roy Lichtenstein: Like New, the first major New York retrospective of the pop artist’s work in 33 years, at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Sarah Burton’s sporty, daffodil mesh dress made me smile. But the reason I chose it for Fashion Museum Bath is because it tells the story of our times, when bodies are more political than ever
One morning in February this year, I opened my laptop to find an email with an all-caps subject line: TOP SECRET. Being a fashion editor can be exciting but state secrets are not generally my beat, so I was intrigued. Sure enough, it was a thrill: an invitation from the Fashion Museum Bath to choose their Dress of the Year for 2025.
What an honour. Dress of the Year began in 1963, the brainchild of the museum’s founder Doris Langley Moore, as a way of keeping a static collection perpetually current. Each year a fashion expert picks an outfit or outfits that capture the year just gone, and these become part of the permanent collection. There is a Mary Quant dress and a Katharine Hamnett slogan T-shirt, Ossie Clark chiffon and Ralph Lauren pinstripes. There is sublime beauty from the catwalks of Yves Saint Laurent and Chanel and John Galliano, and pieces of cultural history: McQueen’s bumsters, Jennifer Lopez’s internet-breaking green Versace Grammy dress, Dior’s “We Should All Be Feminists” slogan, Naomi Campbell’s pandemic hazmat suit, a Black Lives Matter T-shirt, and the dress worn by the Duchess of Sussex for her Oprah interview in 2021. “Dress” is interpreted loosely, in the sense of clothing rather than a frock: the lineup includes men’s suits. The Bath museum is currently mid-revamp, having closed its doors in 2022, with construction soon to start on a new museum set to open in the city’s old post office in 2030. Meanwhile the collection is stored in Wiltshire and can be seen online.
Tate Britain, London The Young British Art of the 1990s was brash and macabre but also intelligent and emotional. This breathlessly superficial show reduces it to a stylish pose
Jake and Dinos Chapman were dismissed by some even in the 1990s as overgrown adolescents selling shock for its own sake, and yet it is their work that brings this dismally shallow show closest to a moment of depth. Their sculpture Great Deeds Against the Dead, based on a print of Napoleonic war atrocities by Goya, is a display of dismembered, bleeding nude corpses hung on a tree. It asks questions about war and art, the representation of pain, whether art can have a moral purpose. The best British art of the 1990s was like that, coming on as brash, vulgar, macabre, yet also unexpectedly intelligent and emotional. Unfortunately this show is neither.
You’d think Tate Britain would want to do justice to a decade in which these Millbank premises played a starring role, staging the Turner prize in the years when bisected cows, concrete houses and elephant dung got the nation arguing. At the start of the 1990s no one thought Britain was a leader in contemporary art. By the millennium, we were better known for new art than new novels.
Scientists used artificial intelligence to analyze wear patterns on an 8-by-6-inch chunk of limestone dating from the Roman era and found in the Het Romeins Museum in the Netherlands.
Kent Hups, a high school science teacher in Colorado, discovered a 23-foot trackway of fossilized dinosaur footprints, which offer a glimpse of how the apex predator moved 66 million years ago.
The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, which is affiliated with Drexel University, cited attendance struggles and higher costs in its decision to close.
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