London Museum Smithfield Opening Turns a Victorian Market Into the City’s Living Room

The London Museum Smithfield opening is now less than a month away. On Saturday 28 November 2026, the museum’s new free permanent galleries open inside Smithfield’s Victorian General Market, ending a decade-long restoration and returning a building that sat disused for more than 30 years to daily public use (London Museum). The old Museum of London closed its London Wall site in December 2022. What replaces it is not a new landmark dropped onto a cleared plot. It is a market hall, coaxed back to life.

Information verified through 4 November 2026.

What the London Museum Smithfield opening actually opens

Three connected spaces, named for their relationship to time. Visitors enter through Real Time, a covered former street on Heritage Fund Street that serves as the main entrance and carries data capturing London in the moment. They move into Our Time, the Linbury Hall beneath the restored dome — a central hub for events, anchored by 13 large installations drawn from living memory. Below ground, at Roman street level, Past Time holds the permanent galleries, telling the city’s story chronologically and thematically through a collection of seven million objects, the largest in the world devoted to a single urban centre (London Museum; ICOM UK).

The objects signal the range. The Cheapside Hoard gets its fullest display ever assembled. Roman writing tablets from the Bloomberg Collection — part of a gift of more than 14,000 artefacts — carry the city’s earliest surviving voices. Emmeline Pankhurst’s hunger strike medal sits a few galleries from Banksy’s Piranhas, the Whitechapel Fatberg and the vest believed to have been worn by Charles I at his execution (London Museum).

One detail tells you how the architects thought about the site. In the Past Time galleries, a six-metre viewing window looks onto the live Thameslink line, so trains rumble past the Roman displays while passengers peer in (ArchDaily). The past, here, has a timetable running through it.

The Smithfield General Market restoration, trade by trade

The General Market opened in 1883, designed by Sir Horace Jones — the architect of Tower Bridge and Leadenhall Market — and was shuttered in the 1990s after more than a century of trade (ICOM UK). The Smithfield General Market restoration was led by Stanton Williams and Asif Khan, working with conservation architects Julian Harrap, and it leaned on craft at a scale modern projects rarely attempt: more than 70 trades, from the country’s last heritage coppersmiths to master stonemasons and Welsh blacksmiths restoring decorative ironwork (London Museum).

Since 2023 the project has also given more than 40 apprentices a start, in plumbing and electrical engineering as well as newer fields such as sustainable construction management. Rediscoveries shaped the plan as work went on — an 800-square-metre system of vaults beneath the streets, and a perimeter of heritage shopfronts now folded into the public spaces (London Museum).

The £437 million project was developed through a partnership between the City of London Corporation and the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, with support from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Goldsmiths’ Foundation, The Linbury Trust and The National Lottery Heritage Fund (CLADglobal).

Stanton Williams and Asif Khan museum design that aims for Outstanding

Reuse came first. Keeping the market standing avoided the embodied carbon of a new building altogether, and the Stanton Williams and Asif Khan museum design layers new systems onto old fabric: toilets powered by rainwater, renewable geothermal energy and an industry-first eco-concrete mix. The museum is targeting a BREEAM ‘Outstanding’ rating, which would place it among the top 1 per cent of buildings worldwide (ICOM UK; London Museum).

Analysis: The design’s real wager is social, not technical. Director Sharon Ament put it plainly — asked how to be the best museum for London, the team answered: “to be London itself, in all its grit and glitter” (London Museum). So Our Time is programmed like a market, not a gallery: a Tuesday Tea Club from Syd’s Coffee Stall, late nights with DJs on Fridays and Saturdays, a monthly Dinner Club, and a first season, London Tastes, co-curated by food writer Ruby Tandoh and journalist Jonathan Nunn, running from November 2026 to August 2027 (London Museum). More than 100,000 people contributed to making the museum, and it expects around two million visitors a year (ICOM UK).

The London Museum Poultry Market 2028 opening is phase two

This month’s opening is not the whole project. The adjacent Poultry Market follows in 2028, adding two temporary exhibition spaces, a dedicated learning centre and a collections store (London Museum). The London Museum Poultry Market 2028 opening will complete a campus that has been planned as one piece from the start.

There is a loss folded into the gain. The museum’s former London Wall home, a modernist building, closed in 2022, and demolition plans for it were approved in 2024 despite community campaigns to preserve it (ArchDaily). London saved one landmark by moving its museum into it, and let another go. Both halves of that sentence belong in the story of 28 November.

Photo: Steve Parker, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Sources

1. https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/about/press/press-releases/london-museum-smithfield-will-open-doors/
2. https://www.archdaily.com/1042614/the-london-museum-moves-to-smithfields-restored-general-market-ahead-of-long-awaited-opening
3. https://uk.icom.museum/london-museum-smithfield-opening-2026/
4. https://www.cladglobal.com/CLADnews/architecture-design/London-Museum-reveals-2026-opening-date-for-new-Smithfield-home/363115?source=news