Welcome to Museum of the Home, located in Hoxton, East London. We exist to reveal and rethink the ways we live in order to live better together. Through our physical and digital spaces we explore the meaning of home – past, present and future.
In 2024, Museum of the Home was awarded the European Museum of the Year, Meyvaert Prize for Environmental Sustainability as a space where nature, buildings, and communities intersect in an urban environment. This model was formed through a capital project with Wright Wright architects that opened up the site, doubled public space, reduced energy use and increased biodiversity. At the same time, we undertook a major rebrand that centred programming for social justice.
Organisational Transformation
We’ve been a museum for over 100 years – opening as the Geffrye Museum in 1914. We gradually evolved from being an offer about and for the local furniture trade to one that addresses wider domestic experience. Between 2018 and 2021 we reinvented ourselves as Museum of the Home, overhauling our public offer and asking the big question: what does home mean to you?
Although many museums explore aspects of home life, as far as we know we’re the only self-styled museum of the home in the world – exploring home as an emotional, psychological, cultural and socio-economic space as well as a built environment. We see home as universally relevant but deeply personal – and the personal is political.
We take an intersectional approach to our site as well as our working practices. Our historic almshouse buildings were originally cellular terraces, spread over three floors. When converted into a museum in 1914, the changes erased evidence of their domestic origins. The capital project took a different approach, inspired by the fact that this is a Museum of the Home, set in former homes. We celebrated the domestic scale and altered the buildings as though renovating a series of terraced houses. Materials such as bronze traced the outlines of absent building fabric – a physical memory-mark of the original dwellings.
To reinvent the museum, we opened it up to the street, reoriented the site and turned a back into a front by creating a new, fully accessible entrance. To provide a warm welcome, boundaries between the museum and the civic realm were disassembled to stitch the museum into the fabric of the city. A permanent seating area – deliberately designed to be non-defensive – is available to the public 24 hours a day.
Family Activities - credit Hayley Madden
Cocooned in Nature
70% of households in the local borough of Hackney lack access to private outdoor space, making the museum’s grounds a green lung in an otherwise densely built area. Across all spaces, the museum now has views of, or direct physical connections to, the gardens. This creates a strong sense of place, bringing the inside out and outside in, and enhancing wellbeing for both staff and visitors.
In its redesign, Museum of the Home is better able to respond to local demand for space from grass roots and social justice organisations in east London. Every week Hackney Food Bank runs a service from our learning pavilion and has partnered with the museum on awareness-raising content in our galleries. For many visitors however, the original frontage of the site is not a welcoming space, with its traditional arrangement of buildings and formal lawns. We’re now exploring new types of gardens that are both non-traditional and drought resilient. We also continue to work to heal the rifts between the museum and its communities caused by the presence on the front of our buildings of the statue of Robert Geffrye, who profited from investments in transatlantic slavery.
In 2021, we began a long-term partnership with Voyage Youth to plan the redisplay of the statue and give space to histories of colonialism and the home. Voyage is a social justice charity tackling racial imbalance in London and, with POoR Collective, a youth-centred design practice, have proposed a nature positive approach to the statue redisplay in a discrete part of the museum’s garden – suggesting natural materials and planting as one way of framing the injustices of both climate and colonialism.
Also outside, our Discovery Garden project uses gardening, creativity and sensory engagement to improve the wellbeing of children. As part of a three-year process with our partner primary schools, we have co-created a new zone that responds to the lack of green space locally, and provides hands-on learning about sustainable building, permaculture, biodiversity and regenerative growing.
We have learned to be agile in our practice. Through this project, we employed a trauma-informed approach when one of our partner schools was unexpectedly marked for closure due to falling birth rates and the rising cost of living in the capital. We adapted sessions to be more open ended – creating space for children and teachers to process grief and change.
'A terraced house in 2024' - credit Jaron James.
A Movement as much as a Museum
2024 was transformational for the museum as we revolutionised our creative practice, putting the people of our local community at the centre of decision-making to create seven new domestic room sets, seven new stories of home and seven different methods of co-curation.
As well as championing personal stories, the rooms place lives within the context of wider socio-cultural realities – such as the impact of conflict, migration, LGBTQI+ rights, intergenerational living, and housing – from tenement flats to squats, and the future of green space in the city
The desire to grow and cook as a practice of care is a key part of the story. In the ‘Terraced House in 2024’ we tell the story of a Vietnamese family through the making of a pho soup and the growing of hard-to-obtain produce in the UK, such as the winter melon. A fear from our partners was around extraction and gentrification of diaspora stories. The room and wider associated programme now represents over three years of deep collaboration with over 50 East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) groups, including creative practitioners, green advocacy and social justice groups. We are also co-developing a new community toolkit – the Library of Ancestral Knowledge – to archive growing, healing and making practices that are integral to ESEA diaspora ways of sustainable homemaking in the UK.
With Interaction Research Studio at Northumbria University, we’ve created a room for 2049 – which is now only 24 years away! It’s not a science fiction view of the future but asks: what current solutions to the climate crisis are we likely to adopt more widely? Such as removable mycelium panels that can travel with the dweller from property to property; plant protein meals; a readjustment of the ‘traditional’ nuclear family. The room looks out onto a future Hackney under water – with vertical farms and climate alert screens. Like all of our roomsets it’s an evolving space that will continue to adapt to the needs of our growing audiences.
Our aim is for Museum of the Home to become a movement as much as a museum. Our work foregrounds local stories that speak to global issues and we believe that understanding the dynamics of home offers fundamental insights into vital debates, from individual well-being to broader social challenges.