Three free to see

January is going by in a bit of a blur as routines kick back in and I find myself back on various sidelines holding the kids' coats or helping out at the Citizen's Advice Bureau office but I have managed to find three free things to see this month that I loved.

Free photography 

 Don McCullin at Tate Britain

This display of Don McCullin's landscapes, portraits, and photos of Berlin in 1961 stays with you for a long time. As a history student, the pictures of the building of the Berlin Wall and the armies facing off against each other across the barricades are utterly compelling. This felt like the start of World War 3 and the tension is apparent in the faces of the army personnel. Meanwhile people pose for photos and stand and watch the action in their Sunday best. I wonder what Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels would have made of a whole square being named after them. 

Don McCullin's industrial landscapes are also important. These landscapes of Yorkshire, Liverpool and Co Durham remind viewers of the enormous human cost to the Industrial Revolution. People are dwarfed, landscapes are grimy and grassfree, children go about their play in front of great piles of scrap metal or belching factories, boys play foorball on waste ground littered with rubbish, mothers push prams down roads that appear to lead into wasteland. This is the other side of heritage, the true face of the industrial landscapes so soon to be transformed into places of no industry or even cleaned up museums to a disappearing past.

I was also taken with Don McCullin's portraits of homeless people in the East End. He tells us that he wants to us to look into their eyes and really see them and his photos certainly force us to do that but the picture that stays with me is the one of a group of men standing, all asleep on their feet as though they've been switched off by an invisible hand.

Tateshorts: Don McCullin (video)

Free exhibition 

 Boxed at The South Bank

Planning your funeral might seem a bit like a morbid pastime ( I have decided on some of the music for mine though) but this exhibition of special coffins from coffin makers in Ghana and Nottingham makes it somehow less Victorian and a bit more,well, fun. 

Plain wooden boxes are so 19th century. These days, you can get 'planted' in eggs, replica cars, (small) Viking longships, or my favourite a giant corkscrew. 

The coffins from Ghana include a cocoa pod, important for the local economy and a small Mercedes, a symbol of success and wealth. 

Go have a browse. You'll probably find yourself musing on what kind of box would best symbolise your life. Could they make a coffin out of a giant bar of chocolate?

Free sculpture

Virginia Dare at St Brides

A beautiful little sculpture that is tucked away at the back of St Brides Church in Fleet Street. Made by Clare Waterhouse (1999) to replace an original (stolen) marble representation,  Viginia Dare was the first English immigrant child born in the Americas of parents who were married in St Brides in 1585.

She was born on Roanoke Island on August 19, 1587: "Elenora, daughter to the governour and wife to Ananias Dare, one of the assistants, was delivered of a daughter in Roanoke". The child was healthy and "was christened there the Sunday following, and because this childe was the first Christian borne in Virginia, she was named Virginia"