London Museum’s new permanent galleries open free in Smithfield’s restored Victorian General Market on 28 November, with exhibits ranging from the Cheapside Hoard to a chunk of the Whitechapel Fatberg, and a viewing window onto a live railway line.
London Museum spent 45 years at London Wall before closing that site in 2022, and the wait for its replacement has been a long one. What opens in Smithfield this November is the result of a decade of work and £437m, funded through the City of London Corporation, the Mayor of London and philanthropic backers including Bloomberg Philanthropies, and it lands in the City of London at almost exactly the right moment: the museum turns 50 next year.
Inside the General Market
The building itself is as much the story as anything inside it. Sir Horace Jones, the architect behind Tower Bridge and Leadenhall Market, designed the General Market in 1883, and it traded for over a century before closing in the 1990s and sitting derelict for thirty years. Stanton Williams and Asif Khan have led its restoration alongside conservation architects Julian Harrap, working with more than 70 trades and taking on over 40 apprentices since 2023, and the museum is aiming for a BREEAM “Outstanding” rating, geothermal energy and rainwater-powered toilets included.
The museum unfolds across three connected spaces. Real Time is the covered entrance street; Our Time, in the restored Linbury Hall, is a social hub built around 13 large installations of London in living memory, including the Lord Mayor’s Coach and East End institution Syd’s Coffee Stall; and Past Time, underground at Roman street level, holds the permanent chronological galleries.
The objects
The mix is genuinely strange in the best way. Past Time includes the Cheapside Hoard, a trove of Elizabethan and Jacobean jewellery getting its fullest display ever, alongside Charles I’s execution vest, Queen Victoria’s mourning dress, Charles Dickens’ chair, Emmeline Pankhurst’s hunger strike medal, and Tom Daley’s diving trunks from the 2012 Olympics.
Then there’s the smashed Fender Precision Bass that Paul Simonon played on the cover of The Clash’s London Calling, Anna Pavlova’s Dying Swan costume, tablas belonging to bhangra pioneer Kuljit Bhamra, and Roman writing tablets from the 14,000-strong Bloomberg Collection, the largest archaeological gift the museum has ever received.
The Whitechapel Fatberg, that congealed mass of fat and wet wipes pulled from London’s sewers in 2017, returns too, sitting somewhere between the Cheapside Hoard and the Selfridges lift on the list of London Museum exhibits nobody could have predicted twenty years ago.
A world-first view of the railway
One gallery in Past Time has a six-metre window built to look directly onto a working Thameslink line, letting visitors watch actual trains pass while they’re standing in the middle of a history museum. London Museum is calling it a world first, and it’s hard to think of another institution with the nerve to build a permanent exhibit around a passing commuter service.
Beyond the galleries
The museum has built an entire day-to-night events programme into Our Time, delivered with partners including fabric nightclub, Morley’s chicken shop and Punchdrunk Enrichment.
Tuesday Tea Club brings free hot drinks from Syd’s Coffee Stall every week from November, Shared Late Nights turn the market floor into a DJ set every Friday and Saturday, and House Party, from February 2027, sees fabric throw a monthly night among the artefacts. Families get Playdates, a Punchdrunk Enrichment experience from January 2027, and Showspace, free sensory storytelling running from November.
The whole programme runs under rotating Guest Editors, with the inaugural season, London Tastes, co-curated by Ruby Tandoh and Jonathan Nunn and sponsored by Sainsbury’s, exploring the city’s food culture from November through next August.
The London x London Take: A free museum with a fatberg, an execution vest and a nightclub residency in the same building is either going to be a genuinely great addition to London or an identity crisis in architectural form, and everything about the Guest Editor structure and the object list suggests the former. The live train window alone is worth the visit. Put 28 November in the diary now, somewhere this ambitious is going to be very hard to get into on opening weekend.
Need to Know
- Where: London Museum, Smithfield General Market, EC1A 9PS
- Nearest station: Farringdon (Circle, Elizabeth, Hammersmith & City, Metropolitan lines)
- When: Opens Saturday 28 November 2026
- Price: Free
