Light Up the Museum

Visit our beautiful, colourful winter light installations, piercing the darkness of the season with luminescent joy | From Saturday 22 October 2022 to January 2023

Highlights

Festooning our garden spaces, Light Up The Museum is free to view and enjoy throughout Winter Festival - within the Museum and from outside, on Kingsland Road, Geffrye Street and Hoxton overground station opposite.

Light Up the Museum features:

Our Victorian plane trees decorated with colourful, twinkling lights to bring extra magic to the front of its almshouse buildings and lawns, visible along Hackney’s Kingsland Road in the Kingsland Road Gardens.

Laxmi by Chila Kumari Singh Burman, on the Museum’s green roof. Chila’s Laxmi - a neon sculpture of the Hindu goddess of wealth and purity - brings a riot of colour and warmth to our green roof, sitting among its array of desert flora. Laxmi will be a beacon of light in the darkness of winter to welcome Museum visitors using our Geffrye Street entrance, passing through this tucked-away thoroughfare, and to those travelling through Hoxton overground station opposite the Museum entrance.

The return home of Winter Melon (pictured above) by Jessica Hung Han Yun, to the windows of the Museum Chapel and Reading Lounge, illuminating the front of our almshouse buildings. Commissioned by Museum of the Home and first unveiled in 2021, Jessica’s light installation features brightly-coloured, gently pulsating discs of light surrounding Cantonese and Vietnamese characters, evoking the vibrant atmosphere of East Asian night markets. Winter Melon takes its inspiration from Naomi Lau’s storybook of the same name.  

Lotus Flower, by Nutkhut, brings a large-scale 3D sculpture emitting a powerful, yet comforting light to the elegant Gardens Through Time for the Museum’s Diwali Family celebration day, 22 October. Having played a central role in previous Diwali celebrations at Trafalgar Square and Neasden’s beautiful Hindu temple, Lotus Flower is a much-loved part of the festival of lights, and this is its first visit to east London.