London Museum opens in Smithfield on 28 November 2026, in a Victorian market building that has been shut to the public for more than thirty years. It is the museum’s fiftieth year and the galleries will be free.
The building
The General Market will run as three connected spaces. Visitors enter through Real Time, where animated screens tell the city’s story from its own data. Our Time sits under the restored dome and holds thirteen large installations drawn from living memory, the Lord Mayor’s Coach among them. Past Time runs below, at Roman street level, through chronological and thematic galleries.
Those lower galleries carry a six-metre window onto the Thameslink line. Trains will pass through the museum while passengers look in.
The collection
The collection runs to seven million objects and the displays draw across it. Roman writing tablets carry the city’s earliest surviving voices, and a floor mosaic and a painted wall fresco surface for the first time in two thousand years. The Cheapside Hoard, Elizabethan and Jacobean jewellery, takes the Goldsmiths’ Gallery. Not all of it is treasure: there is a display on the Great Fire, and a piece of the Whitechapel fatberg.
Sharon Ament is director, and more than 100,000 people contributed to the museum’s making. Its first guest-edited season, London Tastes, runs from November 2026 to August 2027 under the writers Ruby Tandoh and Jonathan Nunn.
For a host
Under the dome, at the centre of Our Time, the museum will run a social space programmed from day to night: a weekly tea club, late nights with DJ sets, and monthly dinner clubs and house parties. The London partners delivering it include the nightclub fabric. A restaurant, shop and show space will sit around the perimeter, and the operators are not yet named.
The Smithfield spaces are listed for hire with no capacities published. The museum’s existing rooms give the scale it works at: Docklands takes up to 1,500 guests on the quayside, London Museum Spaces at 150 London Wall up to 250, and across the two it quotes 1,400 for a reception and 420 for a seated dinner. Enquiries go to its venue hire team direct.
London Museum is listed on Opening Soon and will join the venue directory once it is trading.