An “epic leaving party” potentially lasting all night will be the final public event of the Museum of London before its building is demolished ahead of a move to a new site, its director has said.
The doors will close for the last time on 4 December, the museum has confirmed, “and we are really gearing up for that last weekend”, the museum’s director, Sharon Ament, said. “If there is demand, we will stay open 24 hours – we really want everybody who hasn’t been to the Museum of London to come and see it.”
The institution, which claims to be the largest urban history collection in the world, has been situated since 1976 in an eccentric building in London Wall, but announced in 2015 that it would move to a new home in derelict Victorian market buildings in nearby Smithfield.
Ament said she was not feeling sentimental about leaving the site, which is squeezed between the Barbican housing estate and a roundabout and has no entry at street level, requiring visitors to navigate a warren of raised passageways to gain entry.
“If I’m really truthful, I can’t wait to move,” she said. “It’s not fit for purpose as a museum any more. It has served us well until now, let’s say, but it really is time to move on.”
First, though, in a five-month blowout the museum will host a packed programme of events, taking in many of its best known and most popular collections, from prehistoric relics and Roman mosaics to artefacts from the Suffragette movement.
A busy summer programme is targeted at families, with opportunities for children to build a giant Roman mosaic from Lego, a Minecraft Roman temple or picnic like a Roman soldier.
School visits throughout the autumn will be structured around a different historical theme each week, and the museum is promising special behind-the-scenes access to some of its 7m artefacts during the Open House weekend in September. The programme will culminate with two weekend-long festivals before the shutters finally come down.
“I don’t know exactly what’s going to come up, and I’m really, really excited about that,” said Ament. “I’ve heard that some of our curators want to go big.” One artefact under discussion is the blimp balloon of Donald Trump, which the museum acquired after it was first flown by protesters during the US president’s visit to London in 2018. “Oh, I would love to see that flying above the museum. Watch this space.”
Ament said she was proud the museum had showcased this newsy approach to collecting. “Museums generally work at a slower pace than most other channels, but what we want to do in our museum is be more journalistic, more rapid-response.” The Whitechapel fatberg – a huge mass of congealed grease that was collected from the capital’s sewers and put on display in 2018 – was another example, she said. “It was found one day, and we collected it the day after.”
Its final two exhibitions, focusing on grime music and the footballer Harry Kane – had been chosen specifically for their broad appeal, she said. “We have a responsibility to engage the whole of London.”
The museum may be relieved to be moving its collections – including the remains of 20,000 historic Londoners stored in a bunker beneath the London Wall roundabout – but there is controversy over what will replace the existing building.
The City of London Corporation, having ditched plans to develop a £288m concert hall on the site, is consulting on an alternative scheme for “a new business destination in London’s economic centre”. Barbican residents are “dismayed”, however and a new campaign is trying to overturn the “monstrous, unsustainable proposals”.
One undoubted loss for the museum when it moves will be its current proximity to a stretch of the existing Roman wall, which visitors overlook even as they examine excavated Roman artefacts.
“But Roman London is all under our feet all over the place,” said Ament, “and yes, we’ll be saying goodbye to one part of London’s history and hello to another. Smithfield is a place where martyrs were burned, William Wallace was hanged, drawn and quartered; the big livestock markets were there. St Barts is the first public hospital in the country. It feels like history is all around.”
