Opening on 28 November in Horace Jones’s restored General Market, the new museum pairs free galleries at Roman street level with a domed hall programmed for tea clubs, late nights and house parties.
The General Market at Smithfield traded for more than a century before it closed in the 1990s, and it has been out of public use for over 30 years. On 28 November 2026 it reopens as London Museum, with free galleries and a programme designed to keep the building busy long after the last school party has gone home. The opening falls in the museum’s 50th year, and the plan treats the building as a meeting place for the city as much as a home for its history.
Horace Jones’s market, restored
The market opened in 1883 to designs by Sir Horace Jones, the architect of Tower Bridge and Leadenhall Market. Stanton Williams and Asif Khan led its transformation, with Julian Harrap as conservation architects. The museum counts more than 70 trades on the project, among them heritage coppersmiths, master stonemasons and Welsh blacksmiths restoring the decorative ironwork.
Some of the building had been lost to view entirely. The restoration brings back an 800 square metre system of vaults beneath the streets and a perimeter of heritage shopfronts. The £437 million project is a partnership between the City of London Corporation and the Mayor of London, with philanthropic support, and the neighbouring Poultry Market will follow in 2028 with two temporary exhibition spaces and a learning centre.
Three kinds of time
The museum is arranged as three connected spaces. Visitors enter through Real Time, a covered former street where large animated screens tell London’s present from the city’s own data. Our Time, in the Linbury Hall beneath the restored dome, holds 13 large installations drawn from living memory, among them the Lord Mayor’s Coach and Syd’s Coffee Stall, which traded in Shoreditch for 100 years. Past Time runs below ground at Roman street level, through chronological and thematic galleries.
The collection behind it runs to seven million objects. Roman writing tablets from The Bloomberg Collection carry the city’s earliest surviving voices, and the Cheapside Hoard of Elizabethan and Jacobean jewellery takes the Goldsmiths’ Gallery. The published designs for Past Time include a six-metre window onto the Thameslink line, so trains will pass through the galleries while their passengers look in. Not all of it is treasure: there is a display on the Great Fire, and a piece of the Whitechapel fatberg.
A dome programmed after dark
What sets Smithfield apart from most museum openings is how much of its plan happens after the galleries close. The museum intends Our Time to run from day to night. A Tuesday Tea Club begins in November 2026 with free brews from Syd’s stall, and Shared Late Nights with DJ sets follow every Friday and Saturday. A monthly Dinner Club starts in January 2027, and from February a House Party on the first Saturday of each month, thrown with the museum’s nightclub in residence, fabric.
The first guest-edited season, London Tastes, runs from November 2026 to August 2027 under the writers Ruby Tandoh and Jonathan Nunn. The museum expects it to shape the dinner clubs, the shop and the restaurant as well as a spotlight exhibition. A restaurant, shop and show space for families will sit around the hall’s perimeter, and the museum has not yet named who will run the restaurant.
Evenings under the ironwork
The same spaces will be available for evening hire from 7pm to 11pm, with extra hours to 1am. The museum gives Our Time as up to 750 for dinner or 1,000 standing, Real Time as 500 standing or 50 for dinner, and Past Time as up to 1,000 standing across selected galleries, with exclusive use of the General Market for up to 1,500. Four LED walls, an in-house event and AV team and Green & Fortune as caterer complete the published arrangements.
The market sits five minutes from Farringdon station, and the published layouts make for an unusual prospect: a dinner for 750 laid under the same Victorian dome as the Lord Mayor’s Coach.