The Wellcome's spring exhibition looks at dirt and cleanliness - their meanings and our attitudes towards them over the centuries. Some 200 exhibits, spanning visual art, documentary photography, cultural ephemera, scientific artefacts, film and literature, explore a history of disgust and delight in the grimy truths and dirty secrets of our past and look at the future of filth.

Inspired by Mary Douglas's observation that dirt is 'matter out of place', the show introduces six different places as starting points for exploring attitudes towards dirt and cleanliness: a home in seventeenth-century Holland; a street in Victorian London; a hospital in 1860s Glasgow; a museum in Dresden in the early twentieth century; a community in present-day Delhi; and a New York landfill site circa 2030. Highlights include paintings by Pieter de Hooch, the earliest sketches of bacteria, John Snow's 'ghost map' of cholera and scientific paraphernalia relating to Joseph Lister. Contemporary art includes a bejewelled broom by Susan Collis and video pieces by Bruce Nauman.

Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Rd, London, NW1 2BE

http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/exhibitions/dirt.aspx