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 is currently underway. The Museum of London boasts an outstanding collection of 7 million objects and tells the story of the cosmopolitan city of London from 450,000 BC to the present day. The move will not only expand the museum’s exhibition space to 26,000 square metres, but it will also relocate the museum closer to London’s Culture Mile, better meeting the needs of its collection and visitors to the museum. The new 33,000 square-metre historic market site dates back a millennium and 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 titled ‘Past Time’, ‘Our Time’, ‘Real Time’, ‘Imagined Time’, ‘Temporary Time’, and ‘Deep Time’. Atelier Brückner won the competition to design the vast subterranean ‘Past Time’ gallery. The £7.5 million project is the first gallery to be commissioned, filling 2,500 square metres of space beneath General Market, and will eventually contain more than six million items showcasing a 2,000-year history of London. When it was first announced in 2015, the new museum project was expected to cost £150 million. In July 2022, the museum was the recipient of three major donations totalling £7 million that brought the museum’s fundraising close to its initial £40 million target. In 2023, a spokesperson announced that the project budget has increased again since it was last estimated at £337 million, rising to £437 million. These additional costs have been attributed to programme delays, inflation, the addition of adjacent buildings into the scheme, and the poor condition of much of the historic fabric. 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 are currently being steam-cleaned, and the jack arches restored. After this, the bulk of construction work in the General Market will begin in late 2023. In March 2023, the museum began 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 in May 2023. The museum’s sister site in Docklands will remain open throughout and be renamed The London Museum Docklands. The new facility will open in 2026 under a new name – The London Museum. However, later stages of the redevelopment, such as the renovation of the neighbouring Poultry Market, are not set to complete until 2028. (Updated 16 May 2023)