London Museum's Sharon Ament to speak at our 'Cultural Cities' event

Above: the General Market Building at Smithfield, which is being transformed into the London Museum, viewed from Holborn Viaduct, over the Farringdon Road

Future Cities Forum is delighted to welcome back Sharon Ament, Director of London Museum, Smithfield, London, to our discussion events.

Sharon will be describing the journey in creating the new museum in the Capital. On her appointment in September 2012, she introduced a new phase of transformation to steer the world’s leading city museum to reflect the energy and dynamism of London itself, including the name change to London Museum and the development of a new museum at in Farringdon, due to open to visitors in 2026.

The museum is making a historic move to create a new home in Smithfield. This is a journey not just about tackling discreet doorways (the museum’s hard-to-find entrance at London Wall has always been a challenging feature of the site). It’s about making sure the museum continues to be engaging and relevant and to inspire people with stories about one of the world’s great capital cities.

London Museum cares for over seven million objects, including a Guinness World Record-holding archaeological archive, which showcase the lives and stories of Londoners over 450,000 years.

The London Collection is a three-dimensional, multimedia biography of the city and its people. It is especially strong for some aspects of London’s history, including but not limited to archaeological treasures, the history of work and social conditions, protest, the struggle for women’s suffrage, ceramics, fashion, photography and oral histories of Londoners’ lives.

In 2016, Stanton Williams as lead architects, working together with Asif Khan and conservation architect Julian Harrap, won an international competition to transform a group of derelict market buildings into a world class cultural destination and a democratic arena for public life. Selected for their “innovative thinking, sensitivity to the heritage of the existing site and understanding of practicalities of creating a great museum experience,” the team has since been working closely with the Museum of London and the museum’s stakeholders (including the GLA, City of London Corporation and the local Smithfield community) to deliver the new London Museum.One of the largest and most significant cultural schemes currently underway across Europe, the project is a showcase of adaptive reuse of heritage buildings. Targeting a minimum of BREEAM Excellent with an aspiration for Outstanding, the project adheres to the principle of ‘circular economy’– looking to reuse and repair over 70% of the existing fabric and to recycle materials where possible, aiming for 95% diversion of waste from landfill.

Stanton Williams says:

'Plans for the museum cover the General Market building – which dates back to the Victorian era and had fallen into significant disrepair – and the Poultry Market building, a 1960s feat of engineering. Both buildings are being carefully restored to ensure that the history and character of this extraordinary part of London is celebrated and becomes an integral part of the Museum’s story telling. They will become the largest artifacts in the museum’s collection, providing wonderfully dramatic display spaces, both above and below ground, capable of hosting an extensive range of exhibitions, retail, learning activities and events, whilst also triggering the imagination of young and old.

'The General Market, a building which itself is the size of an entire city block, will host a number of shop fronts around its perimeter, lending themselves to collaborations and partnerships with external players and reinforcing the dialogue with the surrounding city. Existing between the two museum buildings will be a canopied city street owned and inhabited by the museum and acting as a major conduit into the surrounding neighbourhood.

'The scheme’s impressive variety of spaces will create the conditions for a new type of city museum, which, rather than an inward-looking repository of the past, will offer itself as a shared place in the middle of London, a space for performances, installations and debates, as well as for rest and reflection. Once it first opens its doors in 2026, the new London Museum is expected to become one of London’s top ten visitor attractions, generating significant economic benefits and bringing over two million visitors a year to the Smithfield area. The new museum will also play a key role in the City of London Corporation’s Destination City initiative, which is transforming the Square Mile’s leisure offer to create a leading cultural destination for UK and international visitors, workers, and residents to enjoy.'

Sharon was born in Peckham and has lived in all quarters of the UK. She studied History of Art at the University of Leeds and is committed to lifelong learning. Throughout her career she has been driven by the premise of 'turning people onto big important ideas and causes' – this started early with her work for a number of small charities in Liverpool where she spent some of her childhood.

She later became involved in habitat and biodiversity conservation, working first with the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust to oversee a national portfolio of wetland centres and then at the Zoological Society of London and the Natural History Museum.

She cites the impact of the Museum of Liverpool, the Walker Art Gallery, and the Picton Reading Room as being formative in her early years.

Sharon has been a cultural ambassador for the Mayor of London. She is Chair of the London Screen Archives, a member of the Women Leaders in Museums Network, the Worshipful Company of Bakers, and a Noyce Leadership Fellow. She also sits on the Scientific Council in Paris and the International Advisory Board of the ArtScience Museum in Singapore.

Below: Smithfield Market, City of London (Matthew Locke)