Introducing our new website

We are a social history museum with London as our subject. Yep, we lucked out – because this gives us an endless treasure chest of stories to share. One of our main priorities for the new website is to find better ways to tell those stories, so that even if you get here unintentionally as a result of a random Google search, you’ll find yourself hooked and gleefully sliding down a rabbit hole of discovery.

Well first up, you will notice that there’s a completely new design to complement the new London Museum brand. If you’re a regular visitor to the website watch for occasional stylistic makeovers of the pigeon logo in the header. Every so often you’ll see it gets re-skinned as a nod to a trending London conversation. Think Google Doodle.

We wanted to make our stories more accessible, so we’ve introduced a whole new layer of editorial content that we call ‘London Stories’. We’re creating 1,000 of these stories about London’s most important people, places, subjects and historic events – both historic and contemporary. You’ll find everything from Harry Kane to the Sex Pistols and the Great Fire to the Empire Windrush in here. We also introduced ‘topics’ so you can filter the full stories list by things like Immigration & Identity, Rights & Activism, Fashion & Style or even Death & Disasters (one of our favourites!). Every London Story page will signpost you to other related stories and related objects in our collections. Some story pages are highly visual with very little text and others are longer reads. Explore whichever style suits you best.

Our online collection has been completely redesigned, we’ve added 45,000 new records and it’s now much easier to browse and filter. If you’re not a history boffin and you don’t know where to start – why not start your journey at a London borough as a way into our collections. We know that Londoners have strong emotional connections to the boroughs they live in or grew up in and we have objects in our collections relating to every London borough, so why not dive in while you’re on the bus home looking for distractions.

Along with editorial curation and content tagging, we’re using AI technologies to help find relationships between stories and objects so that wherever you are on the website, you will always be signposted to something else that might interest you. We’ve decided to do this a bit differently to most museum online collections though. This is because we think that ‘lateral’ connections between things are often more interesting than ‘literal’ ones.

For example, imagine you are looking at a collection item online which is a ‘Charles II five guinea coin minted in 1688’. A literal collections model would most likely just signpost you a bunch of other coins. But given the interesting history and context of the coin you’re looking at, we think it would be more interesting to signpost you to content that is more laterally related – for example Charles II, Guinea in West Africa or the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

If on the other hand you really only want to look at coins – just do a search for ‘coins’!

What? You had no idea? Well it's your lucky day – if you are really into fashion, archaeology, Black history, Roman London or just the stories of hidden London that make you sound cool when you recount them in the pub – we’ve got email updates for you that will make for fun reading. Sign up here

You’ll notice we’ve made much more use of images, because this is what our audience told us they found most engaging. For the first time we’ve also used high quality images in collections online which you can now zoom and rotate, just hit the controls at the top right of any object page with an image.

If you come across a download symbol on a collections page image that means the image is free for you to download and use yourself under a Creative Commons licence. There are 17,000 images available for free download currently and we hope to add many more over time. Don’t forget to credit © London Museum if you use any of these images!

On a more practical level, there’s a new simplified navigation which should help you find the content you are looking for. And an improved search function which presents you initially with the top three results across events, blogs & stories, collections objects, schools content and then everything else. If you want to see all results in any category just hit the green ‘view all’ button.

Event pages have been redesigned so that all the practical information and visit information can all be accessed in one place. And if you are booking event tickets you’ll see that the booking journey is more concise and looks nicer. Most importantly we’ve added fast ways to pay with Google Pay available now and Apple Pay and PayPal coming soon.

The concept for this website was shaped by research insights from over 4,000 people about how and why they do and don’t like to engage with online content. We’ve got lots more exciting development and content still to come, but for now, if you have any feedback or ideas for how we can continue to improve and evolve the website, or you just need to report a bug, we’ve set up a handy short form here.

Happy exploring and we hope you enjoy it.

We’re very grateful that this project was developed with the support of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Digital Accelerator for Arts and Culture.