Take splat: London Museum unveils pigeon-and-poo logo

The Museum of London has officially been renamed London Museum as it nears the half-way point of its £437m project to relocate to Smithfield Market.

The institution launched its new name and website this week along with a quirky new icon featuring a white clay pigeon and gold poo splat.

The pigeon was chosen to symbolise the brand as “an impartial and humble observer of London life”, the museum said in a blog post on the redesign. It hopes that, over time, people will come to recognise the pigeon and splat as signifiers of London Museum.

“A good logo gets people talking,” said London Museum director Sharon Ament. “Our pigeon, cast from London clay, and its splat, rendered in glitter, prompts people to reconsider London.”

The pigeon and splat represent “a place where the grit and the glitter have existed side by side for millennia”, said Ament.

“We share our city with others, including millions of animals. Pigeons are all over London and so are we,” she added.

The rebrand was led by Uncommon Creative Studio and involved a consultation with 500 Londoners and tourists.

The studio’s co-founder, Nils Leonard, said: “"We wanted more than a new identity for this amazing museum, we wanted to find a new icon for London itself.

“Something honest, something remarkable. After extensive research the answer had been strutting around in front of us the whole time. You can find it in the grit and the glitter, proud in every borough, and now immortalised in this identity. We wanted the pigeon to also become a reflection of the diversity and constantly changing beauty of the city.

“So we designed it as a blank canvas that could mirror the influences, identities, ideas or events shaping London. We then created a new body language for the museum, a scrawled typographic approach and a bold new icon."

Developed with agency partner Something More Near, the museum’s new name, which was first revealed in 2022, “felt like a clearer proposition” than its old identity and “a confident statement about who we are and what we do”, the blog post said.

The new name harks back to the museum’s original title; it was originally called the London Museum before it merged with the Guildhall Museum in 1976 to become the Museum of London.

The museum’s new website is designed to be an easier and more enjoyable experience for users. There will be occasional stylistic makeovers of the pigeon logo in the header, which will sometimes get “re-skinned as a nod to a trending London conversation”.

In order to make the museum's stories more accessible, a new layer of editorial content has been created called London Stories, featuring 1,000 tales about London’s most important people, places, subjects and historic events – both historic and contemporary. Every London Story page will signpost users to other related stories and related objects in the collections.

The site's collections database has been built to address three key user problems, according to the museum’s head of digital innovation, Trish Thomas, who is keeping a blog of the transformation.

Feedback from users indicated that they had difficulty finding a way into the collections; kept hitting dead ends; and couldn’t see how the content was relevant to them.

The new website uses AI to help digitise and standardise data for the museum’s 7 million objects, including new taxonomy aimed at non-specialist users, the use of Yake and Open AI to generate topical and contextual relationships between stories and objects, and the use of AI Natural Language Processing to extract keywords from its collections data to surface more “lateral rather than literal” connections.

The museum has also used AI to create alt text for the 130,000 object images in its online collection, making them accessible to users with screen readers.

The rebrand comes as London Museum undertakes one of the most ambitious cultural redevelopment projects of the coming decade.

The institution, which closed its London Wall site in 2022, is transforming the formerly derelict, Victorian-era Smithfield Market building in Farringdon, central London, into a world class museum, with its permanent exhibition spaces due to open in 2026.

The adjacent 1960s Poultry Market building, which will house temporary exhibitions, learning spaces and collections stores, is scheduled to open in 2028.