There is currently nowhere to visit. The Migration Museum closed its Lewisham home after five years, has no replacement venue open in September 2026, and is building a permanent museum in Aldgate, in the City of London, due to open in 2028. Its exhibitions can be explored online in the meantime, free.
That is an unusual thing for a museum guide to have to say, so it is worth saying plainly at the top. If you have read about the Migration Museum and want to go, check the museum's own website on the day; do not travel to Lewisham, and do not look for an address in the City yet.
What the museum is, and why it matters, is easier to explain. It tells the story of who came to Britain, who left, and what both did to the country, using personal stories rather than object cases, and its exhibitions have always been free in the way that London's free museums are. It has never had a permanent building, though. For more than a decade it has worked from borrowed spaces, and that is the reason this page exists in the state it does.
The Migration Museum: where things stand
- Open to visitors?
- No. No public venue as of 28 September 2026
- Last permanent home
- Unit 11, Lewisham Shopping Centre SE13 7HB, from February 2020, for about five years
- New museum
- Purpose-built, in Aldgate in the City of London, due to open in 2028
- Terms of the new site
- 60 years rent and service-charge free, in partnership with the developer Dominus and the City of London
- Admission, historically
- Free, with no booking
- Charity number
- 1153774 (Migration Museum Project, company 8544993)
- Meanwhile
- Online exhibitions, a podcast series, a schools programme and UK-wide partnerships
Why there is nothing to visit
The museum's own pages tell the story between the lines. Its home page describes it as building "the UK's missing museum" and says it has been "based in a series of temporary venues, most recently in a shopping centre in Lewisham". The past tense is deliberate. Its address for visitors, the page at /visit, now returns an error, and each of its major exhibitions carries a note saying it has closed to the public.
That includes the touring exhibition. Heart of the Nation: Migration and the Making of the NHS travelled from Leicester in June 2023 to Leeds in November 2023 and to Lewisham in March 2024, won Temporary or Touring Exhibition of the Year at the Museums and Heritage Awards in 2024, and has now finished. Its own page says free admission and no booking, which was the pattern for everything the museum did.
Listings sites still send people to Lewisham Shopping Centre. The museum's Lewisham page has not been updated since 2020 and still reads as though the venue is about to open. The unit, a former branch of H&M, is not a museum any more. Our Lewisham guide covers what is actually there.
The five Lewisham years, and what they achieved
The museum opened in Unit 11 of Lewisham Shopping Centre in February 2020, in a large space that had been an H&M store, and stayed about five years. Putting a national museum inside a suburban shopping centre was the point rather than a compromise: it reached people who do not go to museums in the centre of town.
The museum's own figures for that period are worth recording. It says its Lewisham venue drew both local visitors and audiences from outside the borough and contributed £2.1 million in economic impact to the area, and that its audience was more ethnically and socio-economically diverse than at other museums. Its front-of-house team was shortlisted for Best Visitor Experience at the Cultural Enterprises Awards in 2026, after the venue had closed.
The exhibitions from those years give a fair picture of what a visit was like. All Our Stories: Migration and the Making of Britain drew together a decade of the museum's work. Taking Care of Business was built as an immersive concept store about migrant entrepreneurs, backed by Arts Council England, the Ahluwalia Family Foundation, Hogan Lovells and Lewisham's year as London Borough of Culture. Inside/Outside and All In Between was curated by local artists with a Lewisham connection. None was a conventional display of labelled objects.
The museum being built in Aldgate
The museum says its new home will be purpose-built, in the heart of Aldgate and the City of London, and due to open in 2028. The arrangement is unusual: 60 years rent and service-charge free, as part of an enabling partnership with the developer Dominus and the City of London Corporation. The building visualisations are credited to 3XN Architects and the gallery designs to Unknown Works.
From the published plans it will hold a long immersive display on Britain's migration history, alongside temporary co-produced exhibits responding to current subjects, and the museum intends the shop, cafe and outdoor courtyard to carry stories rather than sit outside them. It has not published a street address, an opening date more precise than the year, or admission prices, so treat all three as unknown.
The location makes sense. Aldgate and Whitechapel are where a great many arrivals to Britain first lived, from Huguenot weavers to the Jewish East End to Bengali Spitalfields, and several of the buildings that record it are within ten minutes' walk of the site. Whitechapel and the East End covers that ground.
What you can do instead, now
The exhibitions survive online, free, and the museum keeps them up specifically because the physical shows have closed. Both Heart of the Nation and Taking Care of Business have online versions with the films and oral histories intact, which is more than most museums provide after a show comes down.
There is also a podcast series, Departures, presented by Mukti Jain Campion, built around a question most British history gets the wrong way round: for most of the country's history far more people left these islands than arrived. A second series, Migrants Mean Business, was hosted by George Alagiah in association with Allianz Global Investors.
Teachers get the most out of the museum in its current state. Its learning programme has worked with more than 38,000 young people, and its Teaching Migration History Toolkit was produced with the British Library. A UK-wide Community Curators programme with five partner museums and galleries will produce displays during 2027, feeding into the 2028 opening, and a panel of eleven young people is advising on the new building.
Where else in London covers the same subject
No single London museum replaces it, but several hold large parts of the same story, and all of these are open now.
- London Museum Docklands is the strongest single answer. Its galleries on the port, the sugar trade and slavery explain how people and goods arrived together, and it is free.
- Bevis Marks Synagogue, ten minutes from the new museum's site, has been in continuous use since 1701 and is the physical record of one of the earliest arrivals.
- Whitechapel Gallery was founded to bring art to the East End and still programmes from and about the area; the Migration Museum worked with it on an east London arts festival.
- V&A East Storehouse in Stratford lets visitors order objects out of store, which is a very direct way into family and material history.
- Southall and Brixton are not museums, but a morning in either explains more about post-war migration than most displays.
All five are free or nearly so, and free things to do in London covers the days when paying for anything is out of the question.
How to check before you travel
Three things are worth doing before you plan around this museum. Look at the museum's own site rather than a listings aggregator, because the aggregators are running years behind. Sign up to its newsletter, which is how it announces venues. And if you are visiting London in 2028 or later, check whether the Aldgate building has opened before you build a day around it, because 2028 is a target rather than a date.
If it does open on schedule it will be the only museum in Britain devoted to the subject, in the part of London that produced most of the story, and free to enter on the museum's own long-standing practice. That is worth waiting for.
Frequently asked questions
Can I visit the Migration Museum in 2026?
No. The museum has no public venue open as of 28 September 2026. Its Lewisham home closed after about five years, its touring exhibition has finished, and its permanent museum in Aldgate is due to open in 2028. Its exhibitions can be explored online free of charge.
Where was the Migration Museum in Lewisham?
In Unit 11 of Lewisham Shopping Centre, SE13 7HB, a large space that had previously been a branch of H&M. It opened there in February 2020 and has closed. Listings sites and map applications still show it, so do not travel on the strength of those.
When does the new Migration Museum open?
The museum says 2028, in a purpose-built home in Aldgate in the City of London, on a site provided rent and service-charge free for 60 years by the developer Dominus in partnership with the City of London. No street address or precise date has been published.
Is the Migration Museum free?
It has been. Its exhibitions carried free admission with no booking, including the national touring exhibition about the NHS. Admission arrangements for the new building in Aldgate have not been announced, so treat free entry as the museum's practice so far rather than a promise.
What can I see about migration in London instead?
London Museum Docklands covers the port, the slave trade and arrival by water, free. Bevis Marks Synagogue, Whitechapel Gallery and V&A East Storehouse each hold part of the story, and a morning in Southall or Brixton shows the post-war chapter better than most displays.
Sources
- Migration Museum - home page and the case for a permanent home (checked September 2026)
- Migration Museum - Our permanent home (checked September 2026)
- Migration Museum - Exhibitions (checked September 2026)
- Migration Museum - Heart of the Nation: Migration and the Making of the NHS (checked September 2026)
- Migration Museum - Press releases, including the 2020 Lewisham announcement (checked September 2026)