Overview search

Leave your coats and bags in our free cloakroom while you visit our exhibitions or use the research library.

Like millions of people across West Africa, Tracy Egbele’s family has no access to safe tap water, and buys plastic-packaged water instead. She highlights the serious problems facing this fragile system, and the daily health risks people are forced to take as a result.

Does displaying dead animals bring us closer to nature, or drive us further apart?

Work begins in earnest to restore order to the archive Audrey Amiss kept of the minutest happenings in her life. Like detectives, the archivists search for subtle clues to chronology in the mass of materials.

Explore the profound impact of physical work on health and the enduring fight for workers’ rights through our new major exhibition.

In May 2022, Wellcome Collection opens ‘In the Air’, a new exhibition exploring our relationship with air and what it tells us about the health of our planet.

Explore the profound impact of physical work on health and the enduring fight for workers’ rights through our new major exhibition.

Rai Waddingham lives with voices other people cannot hear. Here she describes how she has come to accept, understand and calm her voices, and to acknowledge her strength.

In working on Audrey Amiss’s archive, Elena is getting closer to understanding her. But the way her niece and nephew remember Audrey adds essential detail to the picture.

Elena describes how specially designed storage allows Audrey’s scrapbooks to retain all traces of her creative process, although their intrinsic fragility means deterioration is almost inevitable.

Gallery captions for the ‘Rooted Beings’ exhibition

Melek Erdal celebrates the physical and mental resilience of her father Yusuf, forged by isolation and dislocation, and reinforced by the distinctive cuisine of his home country, Turkey.

Many of us are guilty of wishful thinking when it comes to our rubbish. Arianne Shahvisi exposes shaky recycling infrastructure and overseas dumping, arguing for an end to waste colonialism.

In a society that viewed getting the vote, and pursuing an education and career, as unnatural goals for women, the pain of endometriosis was viewed as nature’s retribution.

Nina Mingya Powles felt adrift in the UK, living thousands of miles from home. But nurturing familiar tastes and smells in her tiny balcony garden helped her roots begin to grow.

Feeling trapped by the idea that an impenetrable carapace of space trash could surround the planet, Elvia Wilk turned to thoughts of the new worlds still to be revealed here on Earth.

In the 20th century doctors tried to find a way to measure pain. But even when ‘objective’ measures were rejected, an accurate understanding of another’s pain remained frustratingly elusive.

Alev Scott donated her frozen breastmilk to a hospital milk bank, but she was curious about other routes. Here she explores commercial operations and informal private arrangements.

Our new exhibition explores experiences and perceptions of ageing, from adolescence to older age, and asks how societies can adapt to ensure everyone ages better.

From safe-use guides to needle exchange schemes, Harry Shapiro reflects on 40 years of drug harm reduction in the UK.