Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life

This is an exhibition I visited earlier this week at the Wellcome Collection in Euston Road which explores our relationship with dirt and how science has gradually gained a better understanding, both of the threat dirt poses to our health and the vital role it plays in our existence. As well as the pictures, books and other objects such as a 17th century chamber pot, which you might expect to see, it also contains a number of contemporary artworks intended to portray various associated messages. I wasn't sure how much these added and I spent more time looking at the short film of magnified microbes, which was quite beautiful in parts, than at any of the pieces of art.

The exhibition is divided into six sections each based around a specific place and time to illustrate the impact of dirt in a particular setting. Thus it starts with the home in Delft in 1683 (with a discussion about the relationship between cleanliness and godliness), moves through places such as the hospital in Glasgow in 1867 (containing some fairly gruesome pictures of gangrene) and the museum in Dresden in 1930 (covering the Dresden Hygiene Museum) and finishes with the land in Staten Island in 2030 (focusing on the future of a major landfill site). Some of these sections worked better than others but organising the exhibition in this way certainly provided a good illustration of how wide the impact of dirt is.

Despite (or perhaps because of) knowing a little of the history covered in the London section (the street in 1854), I found this the most interesting. It addresses the period in the 19th century when the public health implications of dirty water first started to be properly understood and illustrates both some of the common misconceptions at the time and the measures that were developed to deal with sewerage and polluted water. So, alongside John Snow's map demonstrating that cholera was being spread from a particular water pump and Bazelgette's designs for Deptford Pumping Station, there are etchings which satirise the dubious advice and bizarre costumes that people adopted in an attempt to defend themselves against cholera.

The exhibition petered out slightly when it got to the 21st century. There was an interesting discussion in the section on the community in New Delhi and Kolkata in 2011 about the lack of proper sewerage in modern day India and the attempts of charities and government to improve this. But the final section on landfill focused entirely on the rehabilitation of one site on Staten Island and did not include any wider coverage of the issues associated with the large amounts of waste we produce. Even more of an omission was any real reference to air pollution given that dirty air is probably the modern day equivalent of some of the problems covered earlier in the exhibition.

That aside, the exhibition is certainly worth seeing and you will definitely wash your hands before eating afterwards! It runs until the end of August and the Wellcome Collection organise free tours of the exhibition on Saturdays as well as various other events.