Shoreditch has always championed the makers — the hands, the thinkers, the creative obsessives who turn imagination into form. This February, that spirit echoes through Bethnal Green as the Young V&A opens its newest landmark show: the Wallace & Gromit exhibition, part of Inside Aardman: Wallace & Gromit and Friends. Running from 12 February to 15 November 2026, it marks a major moment in East London’s creative calendar — and a joyful invitation for families, young makers and curious adults to rediscover the art of stop-motion.
Aardman celebrates its 50th anniversary next year, making this exhibition far more than nostalgia. It is a tribute to the studio’s craft, its storytelling evolution and its unstoppable influence on generations of animators, designers and filmmakers.
Inside, visitors step behind the curtain — into the sketchbooks, storyboards, sculpted models and handmade worlds that shaped not only Wallace and Gromit but also Chicken Run, Shaun the Sheep, Morph, Robin Robin and more.
A Deep Dive into Craft: How Stop-Motion Magic Takes Shape
The Wallace & Gromit exhibition offers more than charming characters. It reveals the architecture of animation — how a single gesture, shadow or pencil line evolves into scenes that feel alive.
More than 150 objects appear throughout the gallery, from early sketches to never-before-displayed models. The collection includes:
- Early character explorations for Wallace and Gromit
- A hand-drawn storyboard from The Wrong Trousers’ legendary train chase
- Puppets, props and design “bibles”
- Set pieces from Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, The Pirates!, and A Grand Day Out
- The studio’s final physical scheduling board
- The motorbike and sidecar from Vengeance Most Fowl (2024), shown publicly for the first time
But what makes this exhibition stand out is its interactivity. Children storyboard scenes, sculpt characters, design lighting for miniature sets and create Live Action Videos. They learn through doing — discovering how simple materials and big ideas collide.
This blend of creativity and hands-on exploration echoes the ethos of East London’s artistic community, which we’ve celebrated in interviews like our conversation with Bradley Theodore, whose expressive style highlights the power of character-driven storytelling.
The Cultural Impact Behind the Wallace & Gromit Exhibition
Aardman’s charm lies in its “thumbiness” — a term the studio uses to describe the handmade textures that define its films. Even as animation technologies evolve, Aardman’s stop-motion retains an organic warmth that feels intimate and human.
Young V&A’s curators understand this deeply. The exhibition explores how two young friends once began animating on a kitchen table, eventually building a studio with global reach while retaining the same handmade humanity that sparked their earliest experiments.
Dr Helen Charman, Director of Learning at Young V&A, emphasises that the exhibition aims to “unpack the imagination” behind Aardman’s craft. The goal is to inspire young visitors to experiment themselves — because the line between kitchen-table creativity and award-winning filmmaking is thinner than it seems.
This philosophy connects with the ideas shared by designer Lee Broom in our interview with Lee Broom, where he discusses design as an interplay of precision and emotion — a balance Aardman has mastered for decades.
A Celebration of Storytelling for East London’s Young Creatives
Young V&A has become one of London’s most important cultural spaces for families since reopening. Inside Aardman continues its mission to empower children as creators, not just viewers.
In an era of hyper-slick digital content, this exhibition feels refreshingly tactile. Visitors encounter clay models worn by fingerprints, paper cut-outs marked with notes, sketches layered with pencil smudges — a reminder of the joyful imperfections that shape great art.
The exhibition also highlights how Aardman uses the world around them as creative fuel. Many of their characters — ordinary, quirky, relatable — are rooted in British humour, eccentricity and community. They feel at home in East London’s creative landscape, where culture thrives in markets, studios, cafés and community-led art spaces.
As we explored in our guide to the best art galleries in Shoreditch, East London continues to be a testing ground for emerging ideas — making this exhibition feel right at home.
Sketch to Screen: The Making of an Aardman Classic
Walking through the exhibition, visitors follow the same journey Aardman takes with every project:
- An idea sparks — often small, sometimes silly.
- Character sketches emerge — lines, shapes, proportions.
- Model makers sculpt and refine — fingerprints pressed into clay.
- Storyboards weave worlds together — pacing, humour, tension.
- Sets grow — tiny cities of cardboard and paint.
- Lighting shifts mood and emotion.
- Animators bring stillness to life — frame by frame.
Children learn how gesture builds personality, how lighting shifts narrative, how patience becomes art.
This behind-the-scenes journey mirrors the creative process explored in our piece on the future of digital art in Shoreditch, where artists mix analogue craft with new technologies in unexpected ways.
Creativity doesn’t require perfect tools
2026 marks Aardman’s 50th anniversary, and the studio is not slowing down. A new Shaun the Sheep film lands later next year, and the studio continues expanding into gaming, immersive installations and children’s programming.
What makes the Wallace & Gromit exhibition culturally significant is its focus on empowerment. It tells children:
creativity doesn’t require perfect tools — just curiosity, courage and imagination.
That message feels deeply aligned with East London’s creative identity, highlighted in our feature on Ben Okri, who speaks about storytelling as a force for renewal and possibility.
Young V&A’s show isn’t only for families. It’s a reminder to all creatives — designers, filmmakers, animators, technologists — that play remains a powerful driver of innovation.
For Shoreditch’s community of makers and innovators, Inside Aardman: Wallace & Gromit and Friends offers both inspiration and affirmation. It shows that world-class storytelling can begin with a simple idea, a bit of clay and the patience to bring characters to life one frame at a time.