Bass guitar played The Clash’s Paul Simonon to feature at London Museum

Immortalised on the cover of the band’s 1979 album London Calling, the instrument is among more than 7 million objects that will feature across the museum’s three interconnected gallery spaces, forming part of the Past Time exhibition, which charts the capital’s history from Roman settlement through to the 2012 Olympic Games.

The museum, housed in the restored Victorian General Market in Smithfield after a £437m redevelopment, will open to the public following a decade-long restoration. Designed by Stanton Williams and Asif Khan with conservation architects Julian Harrap, the project returns the Smithfield building to public use for the first time in over 30 years.

Simonon’s bass – on loan from the band’s archive – will be displayed alongside other cultural artefacts including Anna Pavlova’s ‘Dying Swan’ costume, tablas belonging to British Bhangra pioneer Kuljit Bhamra, and Tom Daley’s 2012 Olympic diving trunks. The instrument’s inclusion comes as the museum positions itself as a social space for London, drawing on the market’s distinctive architecture to unite its collection with the city’s communities.

Visitors will enter the museum via the first of the museum's interconnected spaces – Real Time – a covered former street that serves as the main entrance – before moving into Our Time, a central hub featuring 13 large installations of objects from living memory. Below ground, the permanent Past Time galleries offer a chronological and thematic overview of London’s history, including the Whitechapel Fatberg, the Lord Mayor’s Coach, Banksy’s Piranhasartwork, Charles I’s execution vest, and Emmeline Pankhurst’s hunger strike medal. Roman writing tablets from The Bloomberg Collection will also be on display, alongside the Cheapside Hoard, one of the most significant collections of Elizabethan and Jacobean jewellery, shown in its fullest display ever assembled.

“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,” explains Sharon Ament, Director of London Museum. “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.”

The museum’s opening programme, London Tastes, will run from November 2026 to August 2027 and celebrate the city’s food culture, led by guest editors Ruby Tandoh and Jonathan Nunn. A day-to-night schedule of activities will include weekly DJ sets, monthly dinner clubs and a partnership with fabric nightclub. Morley’s chicken shop, Punchdrunk Enrichment and Hive Curates are also among the collaborators.

The museum will also offer what it describes as a world-first: a six-metre viewing window in the Past Time galleries, allowing visitors to watch live trains rumble through as passengers peer in from the passing Thameslink line.