London Museum Announces November Opening of New Smithfield Market Galleries
7June 26, 2026
After an effort that was first announced11 years ago,LondonMuseum will open its new free, permanent galleries at Smithfield market on November 28th, 2026, the institutionannouncedlast week. The debut of the £437 million museum project is the result of a partnership between the City of London Corporation and Sadiq Khan, London’s mayor. The new facilities, located within Smithfield’s historic General Market building, will include an entrance dubbed “Real Time,” a former covered street fitted with screens playing “the stories of London and Londoners today [generated] using the city’s data.”
Other sophisticated features include a central area for exhibitions and performances called Our Time and an underground exhibition space dubbed Past Time. November’s opening will be followed by the 2028 opening of an adjacent space in Smithfield Poultry Market, which will contain a learning center, a collections store, and temporary exhibition space.
The new London Museum was designed by Stanton Williams and Asif Khan in collaboration with the conservation architects Julian Harrap. Inside, visitors can find London-related artworks and ephemera such as Banksy’s Piranhas (a police sentry box that the iconic street artist spray-painted with fish) and the Whitechapel fatburg, a colossal congealed mass of oily refuse that was discovered in London’s sewers in 2017. Visitors can also view the museum’s Bloomberg Collection, which houses 14,000 Roman artifacts.
In Past Time, museumgoers can delight in exhibits related to English icons: a chair that belonged to Charles Dickens will be on display, as will Olympic diver Tom Daley’s swim trunks.
Previously known as the Museum of London, the museum embarked on a major re-envisioning of its premises and brand in 2022 when it shut down its site at London Wall; it was renamed London Museum in 2024.
The Smithfield expansion project was achieved via a combination of public and private funding. Principal contributors include Bloomberg Philanthropies, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, Goldsmiths Foundation and the Linbury Trust.
“The opening of the new London Museum will be a hugely significant moment both for London and internationally,” mayor of London Sadiq Khan said in a statement. “Backed by one of the largest ever cultural investments in our capital, London Museum will attract millions of visitors and Londoners and reinforce our status as the culture capital of the world.”