London Museum turns a Thames-clay pigeon and glitter splat into its new city icon (2024)

In July 2024 the Museum of London announced it was renaming itself London Museum, reviving the title it held before a 1976 merger, on the road to a £437m move from its London Wall site to the Victorian Smithfield Market. Two years before the museum's 2026 opening, its research found the 2008 logo 'unpopular, representing neither our identity nor aspirations', and focus groups of 500 Londoners and tourists wanted the museum to address big issues and be grounded in the realities of London life. The brief to Uncommon Creative Studio was bigger than a logo: find a new icon for London itself.

The Book of Boroughs — more than 110 hours of debate with 503 voices from every London borough — pointed Uncommon to an unexpected icon: the pigeon. A white bird hand-moulded from Thames clay, paired with a glittering splat based on real droppings, stood for what director Sharon Ament called 'a place where the grit and the glitter have existed side by side for millennia'. Around it Uncommon built Museum Sans and a scrawled London Hand type system, and designed the pigeon as a blank canvas that could be re-skinned for cultural moments.

The logo divided Britain almost immediately — the BBC's coverage said it 'divides opinion' — but Ament's answer was that a good logo gets people talking. In August 2025 thirty-three giant pigeons designed by artists from every London borough went up around the Smithfield site, each telling a different London story. In May 2026 the identity won a Gold Pencil at The One Show in Design in Advertising, capping a two-year run that turned a pooping pigeon into the emblem of a museum about to reopen.