Londinium: the making of a Roman city

Londinium: the making of a Roman city opens in the London Museum's underground vaults in Spring 2027, and it's the first show to run in a part of the museum that was only discovered by accident. Back in 2019, builders working on the decade-long redevelopment of the museum's new Smithfield Market site broke through a wall and found an 800-square-metre network of vaults. They'd been used for storage by the Victorian General Market and a nearby railway, and they've now been turned into a gallery. The exhibition is the inaugural show to open them up to the public.

The display focuses on the first 50 years of Roman London, and it's built around the Bloomberg Collection: more than 14,000 Roman artefacts unearthed at Bloomberg's European headquarters between 2012 and 2014, and gifted to the museum in 2025. It's described as the largest assemblage of small finds ever recovered from a single London excavation, and the exhibition brings those objects to life through the stories of ordinary people rather than just the big names of history.

Working with experience design agency Journey, the museum has used dynamic projection, animation and spatial soundscapes to build the atmosphere. Among the things on display for the first time are wax writing tablets, an infant's feeding bottle and a coin from the reign of Nero. The focus is on the small, personal things that survived from the city's early Roman days.

It's free to visit, and it runs in the underground vaults beneath Smithfield Market, in the restored Victorian General Market.