The Biggest New Museum in a Generation Has a Date: London Museum Opens in Smithfield

For a decade, one of the largest cultural projects in Europe has been taking shape behind hoardings in the City of London. Now it has a firm date. On 28 November 2026, the London Museum will throw open the doors of its new home inside Smithfield’s Victorian General Market, and by any measure it is one of the most significant openings this country has seen in a generation.

The figures alone are striking. The project has cost £437 million, funded through a partnership between the City of London Corporation and the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, with philanthropic backing from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Goldsmiths’ Foundation, The Linbury Trust and the National Lottery Heritage Fund. The result is a free permanent museum drawing on a collection of seven million objects, the largest in the world relating to a single city. For anyone who cares about how Britain tells its own story, this matters.

A market reborn

Part of what makes the project unusual is where it is happening. The museum has moved out of its old Barbican rotunda, a building few Londoners ever warmed to, and into the disused General Market at Smithfield. Opened in 1883 and designed by Sir Horace Jones, the architect behind Tower Bridge and Leadenhall Market, the building traded for over a century before closing in the 1990s and sliding into disrepair. Returning it to public use for the first time in more than three decades is a considerable feat of conservation.

The architects Stanton Williams and Asif Khan, working with conservation specialists Julian Harrap, have handled the transformation, drawing on more than seventy trades along the way, from the country’s last heritage coppersmiths to Welsh blacksmiths restoring the ironwork. The restored dome is the centrepiece, and beneath the streets the team rediscovered an 800-square-metre system of Victorian vaults. There is an eye to the future too: the building aims for a BREEAM ‘Outstanding’ rating, which would place it among the top one per cent of buildings worldwide for sustainability, with rainwater-powered toilets and geothermal energy.

Grit and glitter

The museum’s director, Sharon Ament, has described the aim as being not simply the best museum for London but “to be London itself, in all its grit and glitter.” That phrase captures the curatorial approach rather well. The permanent galleries, called Past Time, sit below ground at Roman street level and run both chronologically and thematically, from the earliest prehistoric inhabitants through the Great Fire and the Blitz to the 2012 Olympics.

The objects on display tell you a great deal about the museum’s refusal to be precious. The dazzling Cheapside Hoard, one of the finest surviving collections of Elizabethan and Jacobean jewellery, will be shown in its fullest display ever assembled. Nearby you might find a chunk of the notorious Whitechapel Fatberg, the vest believed to have been worn by Charles I at his execution, Emmeline Pankhurst’s hunger strike medal, and the smashed Fender bass that Paul Simonon wielded on the cover of The Clash’s London Calling. Roman writing tablets from the Bloomberg Collection, part of the largest archaeological gift the museum has ever received, will let visitors read the city’s earliest surviving voices. There is even a six-metre window onto the Thameslink line, so visitors can watch trains rumble past as passengers peer back in, a genuinely novel museum experience.

More than galleries

What sets the new museum apart from a conventional institution is its insistence on being a social space rather than a hushed hall. At its heart, beneath the restored dome, sits Our Time in the Linbury Hall, a hub ringed by a restaurant, shop and thirteen large anchor displays, among them the Lord Mayor’s Coach and Syd’s Coffee Stall, the East End institution that traded in Shoreditch for a century.

The programming reads more like a cultural venue than a museum. There will be free Tuesday tea sessions, Friday and Saturday late nights with DJ sets, a monthly dinner club, and a house party staged with the nightclub fabric, letting visitors dance on the old market floor amongst the artefacts. Families are catered for with immersive theatre from Punchdrunk Enrichment. Rotating guest editors will shape seasonal themes, and the inaugural programme, London Tastes, is co-curated by the writers Ruby Tandoh and Jonathan Nunn, exploring the city’s food culture from pie and mash shops to chicken shops.

Why it matters beyond London

For readers of The Journal, most of whom will be visiting independent galleries rather than national museums, the significance is broader than a single building. A free, ambitious, seven-days-a-week cultural anchor in the City sends a signal about public investment in culture at a moment when many regional institutions are struggling and gallery closures have become distressingly common. It also demonstrates that heritage buildings, sensitively handled, can become genuinely contemporary spaces rather than mausoleums.

The Poultry Market next door will follow in 2028, adding temporary exhibition halls, a learning centre and a collections store. For now, 28 November is the date to mark. Reopening in time for the museum’s fiftieth anniversary, it promises to be one of the great free days out in Britain, and a reminder that a museum can be a living part of a city rather than a monument to its past.