ABBA museum

THE world's first museum in honour of legendary Swedish disco group ABBA will open in an old customs building in central Stockholm in 2009. “ABBA the Museum” will be on the island of Soedermalm, in a waterfront building a short walk from the city centre.

The exhibition will fill three floors and more than 4000 square metres of material related to the super group, initiators and ABBA fans Ewa Wigenheim-Westman and Ulf Westman said.

The old customs building - Tullhuset - is a protected heritage site on the banks of the Baltic Sea, not far from another popular tourist attraction, the Old Town. “The city will rebuild Tullhuset and work will begin at the end of the year. Afterwards the museum will pay rent,” Stockholm mayor Kristina Axen-Olin said.

“So far we don't know how much it will cost.”

The couple behind the project, Wigenheim-Westman and Westman, pitched their idea for a museum last November and initially indicated it would open in 2008.

The museum will be an ultramodern place, filled with ABBA's music, original clothes, images, instruments and much more that captures the group's heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, the couple said.