Gunther Von Hagens’ Body Worlds To Open London Museum theguardian.com

One of the world’s most successful travelling exhibitions, Gunther von Hagens’ collection of flayed corpses and plastinated internal organs, is to get a permanent space in the UK.

The organisation behind Body Worlds announced on Thursday that it was opening a flagship venue in a former music hall in Piccadilly Circus, London, that was home for more than a decade to Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

Von Hagens, a fedora-wearing German anatomist, came to fame in the UK when he performed a live autopsy on Channel 4 in 2002. More than 1.4 million people tuned in to watch him dissect a 72-year-old male corpse, the first public autopsy for 170 years. A subsequent exhibition of artfully arranged bodies in Brick Lane, east London, was something of a sensation.

Versions of Body Worlds have toured the world and have been seen by more than 47 million people in 130 countries since 1995. Peter Tabernal, the founder of Body Worlds London, said he had been looking for a permanent space in the city for more than two years before the London Pavilion came up.