The 23rd London Design Festival ran for nine days in September 2025, with the V&A as its hub and Lee Broom lighting the Royal Festival Hall plaza.
The 23rd London Design Festival ran for nine days, from Saturday 13 to Sunday 21 September 2025, with the V&A as its hub.
The Festival is a programme more than a place. Sir John Sorrell and Ben Evans launched it in 2003 on the argument that London had the designers, the schools and the buyers but no single week to show them together. Ten design districts now carry most of it, among them Bankside, Brompton, Mayfair, Park Royal and the Shoreditch Design Triangle, each a cluster of studios, showrooms and galleries with its own curator. The V&A and the Design Museum anchor the centre, and four London Design Medals are awarded each year.
The V&A’s programme in 2025 was co-curated by Carrie Chan and Kristian Volsing and took design’s response to crisis as its subject, with installations by Alicja Patanowska, Jakkai Siributr and Ryunosuke Okazaki, and a commission for the emerging designer Roo Dhissou.
Two landmark projects took the Festival outdoors. Paul Cocksedge’s What Nelson Sees stood in Trafalgar Square, a frame of intersecting steel tubes aligned to Nelson’s Column that showed the city moving back through a century and then forward. Lee Broom’s Beacon, a 4.9-metre structure of recycled cast glass, lit the plaza of the Royal Festival Hall. The medals went to Michael Anastassiades, Norman Foster, Sinéad Burke and Rio Kobayashi.