The 24th London Design Festival runs 12 to 20 September 2026, hubbed at the V&A with the commissioned programme V&A x LDF26: Awakenings.
Sir John Sorrell and Ben Evans launched the London Design Festival at Bloomberg on 25 March 2003, with backing from the design trade, the universities, government and the city’s cultural institutions. The argument was that London had the designers, the schools and the buyers but no week in which to show that it had them, and that other capitals were taking the credit. Twenty-four editions later the Festival is the reason the international design trade books September flights to London rather than to Milan alone.
The V&A has been the hub for most of the Festival’s life, which matters because a design week hosted by a national museum is judged on the work rather than on the stand. The commissions go into the permanent galleries, so a new piece is seen against the collection that formed the designer. Eleven design districts carry the rest of the city, each one a real cluster of studios and showrooms rather than a marketing boundary drawn for the week.
The 24th edition runs from 12 to 20 September 2026. The museum programme is V&A x LDF26: Awakenings, a set of site-specific installations threaded through the galleries and built around what it means to design while artificial intelligence mediates the result, and the Global Design Forum talks sit alongside it. Soho joins Bankside, Brompton, Chelsea, Mayfair and Shoreditch on the district map this year.