London Design Festival 2026: the pavilion, the Barbican collection and a power station opening after 13 years (5 September 2026)

The Landmark Project is a bamboo pavilion on Strand Aldwych

This year's Landmark Project is The Pangolin Shield, by architecture practice Studio Saar with engineers Atelier One, on Strand Aldwych from 12 to 20 September. The structure is clad in traditional Indian bamboo police shields and in palm-leaf rain covers known as knups, turning objects associated with authority into a communal space, and it takes its form from the pangolin, the most trafficked mammal in the world.

It is the sort of piece that reads better in person than in a render, because the whole argument is in the material and the layering. Source: Dezeen, 3 September 2026.

Made x Barbican: a 23-piece collection drawn from the estate's own interiors

Furniture brand Made has produced a 23-piece collection of furniture, lighting, textiles and accessories developed from the Barbican's original interiors, including the show home interiors by architect Miriam Howitt. An installation on the ground floor of the Barbican Centre sets out how the estate's layouts and details fed into the pieces, running 12 to 20 September.

For anyone specifying in a period or brutalist flat this is the most directly useful thing in the programme, because it is a rare case of a mass-market brand working from a documented interior archive rather than from a mood board. Sources: Dezeen and London Design Festival.

Wapping Hydraulic Power Station opens for the first time in 13 years

The 1890 power station at 25 Wapping Wall opens to the public for the first time in 13 years, from 11 to 15 September, to host The Art of Sound. L-Acoustics has built a 12-speaker system for the space, carrying a sound installation by computational biologist Max Cooper and a recording of the Humber estuary by sound recordist Chris Watson.

Access to the building is the draw as much as the programme. Source: Dezeen.

Past Made Present at Ham House, and 102 designers at Aram

Graduates of Kingston University's MA Product and Furniture Design course take over the 17th century Ham House in Richmond from 12 to 20 September with Past Made Present. The pieces respond to the house itself: a throne that reinterprets Dutch marquetry to examine colonial histories, Coade stone objects used as viewfinders for architectural details people walk past, and a speaker cabinet drawn from the house's Japanese lacquer cabinets by way of modern listening bar culture.

At Aram on Drury Lane, from 11 September to 10 October, the non-profit collective Design Everything has turned the downstairs gallery into the flat of a young designer, furnished entirely with objects by 102 emerging practitioners. Each was made in response to a limitation of space, time, budget or access, selected from an open call that drew more than 500 responses, and the show is free to exhibit in. Upstairs there is a free coworking space and an Arflex pop-up. Source: Dezeen.

Also worth the walk

• SCP opens its new five-storey Clerkenwell townhouse, 16 Clerkenwell Green, 12 to 19 September, with interiors by Nice Projects, ceramics by Martino Gamper with Bitossi and a lighting collection from Blue Green Works.
• Material Matters, in its fifth edition and now at Unlocked Shoreditch, 118 Curtain Road, 15 to 17 September, with more than 50 exhibitors including bacteria-grown tiles from Biomason.
• Awakenings at the V&A, 12 September to 18 October, the museum's AI-themed programme including the Emerging Design Commission.
• The Lavery at 4 Cromwell Place, 12 to 20 September, curated by Alex Tieghi-Walker, with a Studio Iron group show that includes work by Kelly Wearstler.

The festival runs across eleven districts this year, including a new Soho Design District, with Shoreditch Design Week inside it from 15 to 20 September.