Project will return the General Market building to use for the first time since the 1980s
The London Museum has shared new images of what its new gallery spaces at Smithfield’s General Market will look like and announced an opening date for this autumn.
Stanton Williams and Asif Khan’s transformation of the Victorian market space, designed with conservation architect Julian Harrap, will open its doors to the public on 28 November.
The £437m project will return the General Market to use for the first time since the 1980s, when it was vacated following years of decline as a wholesale fruit and vegetable market.
The Museum of London has been transforming the space since 2015 alongside the adjacent Poultry Market, which will open as two temporary exhibition spaces, a learning centre and a collections store in 2028.
The project has seen costs rise by £100m since its initial budget of £337m was set at the start of its main construction phase in 2020 with the bulk of its funding coming from the City of London Corporation and the mayor of London.
Visitors to the General Market will enter through a covered former street featuring displays showing real time data from the capital, before moving into a large hub space called “our time” which will display objects from within living memory.
This leads into “past time”, the museum’s permanent galleries exhibiting objects from the capital’s 2,000-year history, which will be located within the building’s cavernous underground spaces.
Highlights confirmed for display across the museum include the shirt which Charles I is said to have worn on the day of his execution, a burned brick from the Great Fire of London, Charles Dickens’ chair, interiors from Selfridges and Anna Pavlova’s ‘Dying Swan’ dress.
The museum will also display the Cheapside Hoard, one of the largest collections of Elizabethan and Jacobean jewellery, and some of the earliest surviving examples of writing in the city from Roman Londinium.
Museum of London director Sharon Ament said: “This has been a long undertaking – not without its challenges but mostly filled with immense joy and hyper-creativity – and now we are counting down the days to welcome our first visitors.
“At the beginning we asked ourselves how to be the best museum for London, the answer is, to be London itself, in all its grit and glitter. We’ve done it with the very best; designers, historians, curators, builders,architects, artists, poets, writers, creators to name a few, all are shapers of London.
“And the very best includes over one hundred thousand people who have contributed along the way. I hope our museum is a place where people can come together, feel at home, and find themselves grounded in the lives, treasures, challenges and innovations of this city’s history. Above all, I hope we make Londoners proud!”
London mayor Sadiq Khan said the opening of the museum would be “hugely significant” both for London and internationally.
“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,” Khan said.
The museum will also host a rolling programme of events including Tuesday Tea Club, offering weekly hot drinks from Syd’s Coffee Stall, late-night DJ sets on Fridays and Saturdays, a monthly dinner club and a monthly ‘House Party’ thrown by the nearby nightclub Fabric.
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