A new museum for London

Most visitors will arrive on foot, probably from Farringdon station. The new Elizabeth line will serve this station, along with the existing Thameslink and tube lines, making it one of the busiest in London. They will be invited to enjoy the diverse character of the local area as they walk to the museum. We will encourage visitors to come on two wheels as well – we love cycling – and will provide plenty of bike stands nearby. At times we will programme events in the streets around the museum. Working with our neighbours, we will play our own unique role in enhancing this extraordinary place.

Visitors will enter through West Poultry Avenue. It will be both part of the city and a portal to the museum, and its character will remain that of a street. It will be a place of arrival, orientation and promise. Our team will welcome visitors and help them to navigate the museum – and, if they need it, the city itself. From here, visitors will move into the General Market or the Poultry Market, or they can stop awhile for a drink in The Cocoa Rooms café. This space will reflect London in real time – the present not the past, the London we experience today, the 24-hour city, constantly on the move. Data visualisations incorporated into the street will reflect London in the moment.

This space, with its beautiful dome, will be where we join with partners and visitors to share our lived experience of London. The space was designed to operate ‘in the round’, and we will honour this intent. It will be a sociable place, with a restaurant, a bookshop for London, a Show Space for learning events, and rich displays on London within living memory. Everyone who enters will bring their own expertise in the London they know and will be able
to join the conversation.

Film is central to how we capture and remember the London we have lived. It will play a key role here, bringing colour and movement. Installations by the museum team and others will explore aspects of London within living memory and today – key events, important themes, personal experiences. Some will change over time, keeping the content fresh.

This space will also be a hub for great London events – from festivals, markets and performances, to talks and discussions about urgent London matters. It will become a new space for Londoners and visitors to the city to gather – whether to join an event or simply because it is a lovely place to meet and be.

Visitors will descend from the General Market to find another world below. Here a journey though London’s past will be set within a spectacular underground space. Its exposed ceiling and atmospheric vaults will reveal its unique sense of place.

Within this space Atelier Brückner will design object-rich, theatrical, sensory and interactive displays, full of human drama over more than 10,000 years. They will showcase the unrivalled breadth of our London Collection, made up of some seven million items. Content will range from skeletons to dress, vehicles to art and photography, and include the exquisite Cheapside Hoard presented in the Goldsmiths’ Gallery. The displays will explore the city’s history through three lenses – time, place and people. They will embrace all that is wonderful about London, but will not shy away from the more difficult and painful aspects of the city’s history. Well-known Londoners of the past will appear, but there will be a particular focus on lives that previously have been too little represented.

A live train line runs alongside this space, once a huge goods depot for the Great Northern Railway. At the far end, in the old salt store, visitors will be able to watch the trains rumble by as passengers peer in – a visceral reminder of the connectedness of these buildings and of the city in which we are rooted.

As visitors enter the Poultry Market, a view will open up of its glorious ceiling, seemingly floating above. Large windows running the length of the building will bring daylight in and offer views through to the sky above. The feel of this space will change through the day and night and with the seasons.

In the former cold stores below will be a portal to the London Collection. A working store will sit alongside a magical labyrinth of things, within which individual objects will invite further exploration – each one a direct, tangible link to the past and a gateway to countless stories. On the ground floor will be a new learning centre and two world-class, state-of-the-art exhibition spaces. In these, we will present ambitious, ‘must see’ temporary exhibitions, drawing on the latest research and innovations in storytelling and design.

Sweeping staircases will take visitors up to a new platform beneath the ceiling. Here, in the centre, will be a dream space in which visitors can lose themselves in fantastical London worlds – past, present and future. Offices, laboratories, learning spaces and a research centre will wrap around the central space, views in and out reflecting the museum’s openness.