The Museum of the Home on Kingsland Road reopens Winter Past, its annual seasonal exhibition, on Tuesday 17 November. It runs until Sunday 10 January 2027 in the Rooms Through Time gallery and is free.
The museum’s period rooms are dressed for a winter celebration in a London home, from a Midwinter feast in 1630 to an imagined Christmas in 2049, the museum says. The rooms were put together with the museum’s Community Authors, a group of local people who suggest and shape its displays.
The rooms
- 1630: a household back from the Thames Frost Fair, warming up with brandy for Midwinter
- 1745: a Huguenot Noël at the home of the Billets, a family of French weavers
- 1790: Boxing Day, when the servants get the day off
- 1830: Twelfth Night, with the Woodruffe children dressing for a fancy-dress ball
- 1878: Christmas preparations in the Stevensons’ home, where Bunoo, an ayah from India, thinks of home
- 1913: the first night of Hanukkah
- 1956: an Irish couple getting ready for Midnight Mass on their second Christmas Eve in London
- 1979: a Christmas party with a family feast as snow falls outside
- 2008: “Friendsmas” in a shared flat
- 2024: a large Vietnamese family Christmas hosted by the Nguyễns
- 2049: roast protein “turkettes” for a holiday the museum imagines was introduced in the late 2030s
Winter Market and events
The Winter Market is on Saturday 28 November from 11am to 4pm, with more than 50 independent makers, small businesses and vintage sellers. Entry is pay what you can, and early access from 10am costs £8. Stallholders listed by the museum include ALT Hackney, Goodordering, Mudlark & Co and Stick Ceramics.
The same day has a talk on Victorian Britain at Christmas and a Fair Isle knitting workshop (£35). Candlelit tours of Almshouse 14, the museum’s restored 18th-century almshouse, run on several dates from 18 November and cost £10, or £8 for concessions.
The wider winter programme, which the museum described in London Now on 5 November, includes talks on Midwinter in Celtic and pagan traditions by Wyrd Books editor Lizzie Stoddart, on the Victorian Christmas by Nicholas Travers and on the demons and ghosts of Christmas past by Sarah Clegg, plus workshops on straw Yule goats and paper marbling.
The essentials
- What: Winter Past, free seasonal rooms; Winter Market
- Where: Museum of the Home, 136 Kingsland Road, London E2 8EA (Hoxton station is next door)
- When: Winter Past 17 November 2026 to 10 January 2027; Winter Market Saturday 28 November, 11am to 4pm
- Opening hours: Tuesday to Sunday and bank holiday Mondays, 10am to 5pm