Museum of London

The Museum of London was formed in 1976 through the merger of the Guildhall Museum and the London Museum, combining two centuries of civic collecting into a single institution devoted to the capital's story from prehistory to the present. Its galleries, built into the London Wall on the line of the old Roman and medieval city wall, present the collection chronologically, moving visitors from Roman Londinium through Saxon and medieval London, the Great Fire of 1666, the Georgian and Victorian city, and the twentieth century. Notable holdings include a fragment of the Roman city wall visible from the galleries, the Cheapside Hoard of Elizabethan and Jacobean jewellery, and the Lord Mayor's Show state coach. The museum's approach blends chronological narrative with thematic rooms on trade, plague, and immigration, using reconstructed streetscapes and archaeological finds excavated across the city. Ongoing archaeological partnerships continue to add material recovered from construction sites across the capital, and the collection is periodically reinstalled as new finds and research reshape the displayed narrative of London's growth.