Unlike James Bond, Sean Connery preferred bomber jackets to dinner jackets.

The exhibition features images, props, costumes and design sketches and, of course, hi-tech gadgets from all 23 of the official James Bond films, a series that kicked off in 1962 with Sean Connery playing the British secret agent in Dr No. The exhibition was suggested and is supported by Eon Productions, the company founded in 1961 by the late Albert "Cubby" Broccoli and Harry Saltzman and now run by Broccoli's daughter Barbara and stepson Michael G. Wilson.

"They decided 50 years must not go by without being marked, and they approached the Barbican, and said 'We've got this fantastic archive'," Dr Greene said. "That's another wonderful coincidence, I suppose, or chance, that makes this exhibition possible – that the company has actually collected things, because not many film companies do that."

In its 50th and 51st years, the Eon series has enjoyed unprecedented success, with Skyfall having taken more than A$1.07 billion at the global box office to date. That is almost twice the tally of the second-most successful Bond film (not adjusted for inflation), 2005's Casino Royale, the first outing of Daniel Craig as the sixth "official" James Bond.

The two non-Eon Bond films – the 1967 spoof Casino Royale (which starred David Niven and Peter Sellers among its seven Bonds) and 1983's Never Say Never Again (in which Sean Connery reprised the role he had 12 years earlier vowed to play "never again") – do not feature. Also absent is Bond's first filmed outing, in a 1954 American TV adaptation in which he was played by Barry Nelson.