London's Best Exhibitions: How to Choose One and When to Go

The cultural calendar in London runs on a scale that is difficult to keep up with. Between the national museums, the university collections and the commercial galleries, something opens most weeks, and a great deal of it closes before anyone outside the trade has heard of it.

What follows is a short guide to how to approach that, rather than a listing that will be out of date within a season. By the way, you should get your tickets now, to be in real britain's lost masterpieces brighton.

Start with the permanent collections

Temporary exhibitions get the attention and the queues. The permanent displays are free, largely uncrowded on a weekday morning, and in several cases stronger than anything currently ticketed. For the material covered on this site, the Islamic and Middle Eastern galleries of the national collections are the obvious starting point, and they cost nothing.

Read the loan list before the reviews

An exhibition is only as good as what it managed to borrow. The press release usually names the major lenders and the headline objects, and that tells you more about whether a show is worth a journey than any review. A single unrepeatable loan can justify a trip; a well-reviewed show assembled entirely from the host collection often cannot.

Go late in the run, early in the day

Attendance peaks in the first fortnight and again in the last. The middle weeks, mid-morning on a weekday, are consistently the quietest. Timed entry has smoothed this out but not removed it.

The catalogue outlives the show

For anything with a scholarly ambition, the catalogue is the durable part. It is usually the only place where the technical study of the objects is published, and it stays useful long after the walls have been repainted. Secondhand copies of major exhibition catalogues are among the better bargains in art publishing.

Look for the small shows

The university and specialist collections in London mount focused displays that never get the coverage of a blockbuster and are frequently more rewarding. A single room built around thirty objects and one clear argument will teach more than four hundred objects arranged by chronology.

Check what is actually on display

A permanent collection is not permanently on show. Objects go out on loan, come off display for conservation, or are rotated because they cannot take continuous light. For anything specific, it is worth confirming before travelling that the piece you want to see is in the building, since collection databases are frequently more current than gallery labels.

What this site covers

The material here is a thousand years of Turkish and Turkic art, from the steppe to the Ottoman Mediterranean, built around a London exhibition of 2005. If that is the subject you came for, the chronology is the place to start, and the object entries are where it becomes specific.