Dark days at museum

After the setting of the sun comes the dark. No sooner had one London tourist destination removed its giant installation of a setting sun than another unveiled its latest attraction: pitch blackness.

The Science Museum has created a room in which visitors are plunged into total darkness and "haunted" by the recordings of ghostly voices from Britain's slave trade past triggered by their movements.

Called simply The Dark, it opens to the public tomorrow, only a few days after Tate Modern's huge sun, created by 144 sodium lights, was switched off and dismantled.

Visitors will be led in groups of 12 into a pitch-black room, nine metres by seven metres, where they will hear voices of people involved in the slave trade.

One is Edward Rushton, a Liverpool man who was so repulsed by the horrific conditions in which slaves were kept that he became an abolitionist. The other characters are Kunle, an African slave who saved Rushton's life at sea, and ship's captain John Newton.

The Dark is open in the Science Museum's Dana Centre from tomorrow until 30 April, 12 to 8pm.