The Last Tuesday Society was founded in 1873 at Harvard by William James & brought to London as a ‘pataphysical organisation in autumn 2006 by The Chancellor Viktor Wynd & The Provost David Piper.  The society is aiming to become a non profit with full charitable status, until that time it is run as a benign dictatorship by the Chancellor Viktor Wynd. The society is dedicated to subverting life, the universe and everything, it seeks to create a new world filled with beauty, wonder and the imagination with  a bewildering array of events and exhibitions all over the country, from recreations of Victorian Seances, replete with ectoplasm in a Cornish Quarry, to Literary Dinners & Salons at The Cafe Royal, Whitechapel Art Gallery and Bistrotheque, Masquerade & Halloween Balls with many thousands of revelers, Wyndstock – a Festival held at Norfolk’s Houghton Hall, Loss; an Evening of Exquisite Misery – a reinterpretation of Gunter Grass’s Onion Cellar Night Club.  We opened our own premises at 11 Mare Street in Hackney in 2008, housing an art gallery ‘Viktor Wynd Fine Art’ on the ground floor and a curiosity shop ‘Viktor Wynd’s Little Shop of Horrors’ in the basement. A project that started half way between theatre and sculpture which metamorphosed into a living breathing thing – a sort of hybrid between a shop and a museum, an academic institution and an art gallery, an installation and a performance. As a sculptural piece the shop lacked a coherent metanarrative, a project perpetually in flux, a sculptural piece like a garden – it grew and changed, needed constant attention and seems to have somehow developed it’s own personality and momentum. In the beginning it was to be a bogus curiosity shop, an attack on shops from one who hates shops and shopping, stuffed with incredibly useless and revolting things, an updated version of Reggie Perrin’s Grot Shop from The Rise & Fall, somehow crossed with a curiosity shop, staffed by actors who would perform a script on unsuspecting customers, a script that would evolve and change according to the audience, but leave them leaving and revolted, or charmed. But as the project took longer to build it grew and attracted a growing band of supporters so that when it opened it was in fact a bona fide Wunderkabinett replete with Shrunken Heads, gleaming mortuary tables, two headed lambs and more. In the meantime Viktor Wynd’s passing interest in the absurd, beautiful, uncanny, macabre & erotic became an obsession and be actively began buying, stealing, borrowing & begging an ever larger amount of objects.  However running a commercial art gallery and an antique shop was not really what the Society was about and it lurched from crisis to crisis so following a successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter the premises were converted into a museum with an events space / cafe /cocktail bar on the ground floor which opened on Halloween 2014.  The premises have been built and maintained by The Society’s Art director the artist  Mat Humphrey

Allison Crawbuck & Rhys Everett joined as Directors of The Last Tuesday Society in 2016, bringing with them a shared passion for mixology & the macabre. They opened The Absinthe Parlour at the Society, and soon transformed Hackney’s best kept secret into the city’s favourite drinking haunt. In 2019, it was voted the Best Bar in London at the 7th annual Design My Night Awards by a public vote of over 180,000 Londoners, and in 2020, their absinthe menu was shortlisted for Imbibe’s Specialist List of the Year. Together, the duo curated the UK’s most extensive list of premium quality, traditional absinthes with award-winning cocktails to pair.