The London Museum: West Smithfield

A major project to move the Museum of London from its London Wall site to the impressive but dilapidated market buildings in West Smithfield has begun. The Museum of London boasts a collection of 7 million objects to tell the story of London from 450,000 BC to today. The move not only expands the museum’s exhibition space to 26,000 square metres, but also relocates the museum closer to London’s Culture Mile. The new 33,000 square-metre historic market site covers West Smithfield’s Victorian-era General Market building and the 1960s Poultry Market building. The ground floor of General Market will act as a new public space to host events and exhibitions, retaining the atmosphere of the historic marketplace. Meanwhile, the 26,000 square metres of exhibition space will be split into six atmospheric underground galleries. The first of these to be commissioned is the £7.5 million ‘Past Time’ gallery, designed by Atelier Brückner, filling 2,500 square metres of space beneath General Market, which will eventually contain more than six million items showcasing a 2,000-year history of London. Additional galleries will be ‘Our Time’, ‘Real Time’, ‘Imagined Time’, ‘Temporary Time’, and ‘Deep Time’. When it was first announced in 2015, the new museum project was expected to cost £150 million, but increased costs attributed to programme delays, inflation, the addition of adjacent buildings into the scheme, and the poor condition of much of the historic fabric means that, as of 2024, this total has risen to £437 million. Fundraising efforts have therefore continued into 2024, with donations including a total of £95 million from the Mayor of London, £222 million from the City of London Corporation, and and £45 million so far secured “through private donations, sponsors and philanthropy”. The Museum of London’s London Wall site closed its doors in December 2022, and in February 2023, it was announced that Julian Harrap Architects had completed the phase one restoration and conservation of the ‘outer crust’ of Smithfield General Market. Below ground, the building’s 10,000 square meters of Victorian brickwork were steam-cleaned, and the jack arches restored. After this, the bulk of construction work in the General Market began in late 2023, alongside the meticulous two-year task of auditing, digitising, packing and moving 10,000 objects to its new site. Sir Robert McAlpine was appointed as construction manager and principal contractor for the project. The museum’s sister site in Docklands will remain open throughout and be renamed The London Museum Docklands. The new facility will open under a new name – The London Museum. In August 2024 this rebrand was officially released, alongside the distinctive new pigeon logo for the museum designed by Uncommon Creative Studio.  The new London Museum is projected to open to the public in 2026, although later stages of the redevelopment, such as the renovation of the neighbouring Poultry Market, which will house the museum’s learning centre, temporary exhibition spaces and collection stores, are not set to complete until 2028. (Updated 9 September 2024)