REBECCA FORD relives the capital's past 400 years at the Museum of London's five new galleries

I'M ON an evening out in London. Men and women in designer clothes stroll beneath the trees, people eat overpriced food served by waiters with attitude, couples flirt outrageously and a woman dressed as a man delights in the attention she's attracting.

This isn't modern London, though, it's the city depicted in Georgian times and the figures are life-sized audio-visual projections.

Click here now for amazing offers to London!

I'm standing in a high-tech re-creation of the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens that once stood south of the Thames. In a nearby case, mannequins in period clothes wear flamboyant hats designed by modern milliner Philip Treacy.

It's part of the Museum of London's five new Galleries of Modern London, three years in the making at a cost of £20million, which opened on Friday.

The galleries tell the story of the city from the Great Fire of London in 1666 to the present day and they complement existing galleries documenting London from prehistoric times.

"London led the world in pleasure gardens, " says Alex Werner, head of history at the museum in the Barbican.
"An average of 1,000 people came to those at Vauxhall each evening. They were renowned for their expensive food and servants could not enter."

There are more than 7,000 objects in the new galleries, including a wooden 18th-century "common" printing press that, thanks to new technology, appears to throw news stories on to the ceiling.

"It's now a very uncommon printing press, " says Alex.

"There are only six of them left."

Want incredible deals to London? Click here now...

Further on, I walk into a cell from an 18th-century debtors' prison. The wooden walls are covered with graffiti.

"Pray remember the poor debtors, " pleads one prisoner, whose misery seems to ripple through the centuries.

One man who heard that cry was the Victorian campaigner Charles Booth, who created a poverty map of the city, a reproduction of which now papers the walls of a room in the museum.

Touch an interactive map and you can zoom in, Google Maps style, to the meticulously colour-coded streets. Black meant "semi-criminal" while yellow designated upper-class areas.

Moving into the 20th century, exhibits range from playing cards made by suffragettes in prison to a trunk containing the goods taken by a refugee family fleeing Germany at the start of the Second World War in 1939.

There is a gleaming art deco lift from Selfridges, clothes by everyone from Mary Quant to the late Alexander McQueen and the original Bill and Ben TV puppets.

The museum also has about 4,000 hours of oral history material, some of which is put to use in an area that immerses you in the Second World War. While archive film flickers on the walls, the voices of people recalling their wartime experiences fill the air.

Spanning the centuries is the 18th-century coach used each year during the Lord Mayor's Show.

A Cinderella-style contraption, its less-than-fairytale suspension often induces motion sickness in its passengers. Nearby, a traditional chain of office sits beside the ex-mayor's BlackBerry.

I end my visit at an interactive model of the Thames, with landmarks such as St Paul's and the Gherkin building. It reminds visitors London is still evolving and invites votes on questions such as what to do with the dead and should the city build higher.

It's not often you leave a museum thinking about the future.

I wonder if they should rebuild Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens?

GETTING THERE:
Museum of London: 0207 001 9844/www.museumoflondon.org.uk. Open daily from 10am until 6pm. Admission free.