Running from 12th – 20th September, London Design Festival showcases London as a design capital of the world through events, fairs, installations, pop-ups and exhibitions happening all over town. LDF also highlights different Design Districts across the city from Bankside to Shoreditch Design Triangle to Park Royal, and spotlights the greatest design talent from around the world. From collaborations with the V&A (not surprising given that it’s one of the world’s leading art and design museums) to Landmark Projects, here are all the best things to see at this year’s London Design Festival.
V&A LDF: Awakenings
The V&A’s festival takeover spreads across the whole museum this year, built around what happens to design when AI starts doing some of the imagining. Aziza Kadyri weaves traditional Uzbek embroidery through AI-generated imagery in Sender Unknown, Nina Davies studies how movement gets tracked and translated in Image Syncers, and Playfool’s Emerging Designer commission explores human labour in the age of AI (automated cleaning is the sort of AI we can get behind).
Sat 12th September – Sun 18th October 2026
V&A South Kensington, Cromwell Road, London SW7 2RL
vam.ac.uk
The Point of Unity and Soul by Mykola Kabluka
Mykola Kabluka’s The Point of Unity and Soul is one of the Festival’s two landmark projects. Where better to exhibit such the landmark project than at one of London’s most recognisable buildings, St Paul’s Cathedral? It consists of two parts: Soul – an audiovisual installation exploring artistic visualisations of neurophysiological research into daydreaming – and The Point of Unity – an immersive light sculpture, conceived as a meeting point of earth and sky.
Mon 14th – Mon 21st September 2026
St Paul’s Cathedral, St Paul’s Churchyard, London EC4M 8AD
londondesignfestival.com
The Pangolin Shield by Studio Saar and Atelier One
The Pangolin Shield is the second landmark project of the festival. Studio Saar has teamed up with engineers Atelier One to build a bamboo grid shell on the Strand and clad it in Indian police riot shield and the woven palm rain covers used by farmers in the northeast of the country, layered like scales. The pangolin is the world’s most trafficked mammal, and the pavilion uses that to ask questions about protection, displacement and who gets to call something a shield, deliberately angled to face the bust of Nehru outside the Indian High Commission.
Sat 12th – Sun 20th September 2026
The Strand, Aldwych, London WC2R 1ES
londondesignfestival.com
Made x Barbican
The Barbican has teamed up with homeware brand MADE on a 23-piece interiors collection inspired by its brutalist bones, drawing on the original 1960s show flats designed by architect Miriam Howitt. Think stained ash, chrome accents and jacquard upholstery patterned on the Barbican’s balconies, alongside a coffee table with the kind of geometric presence you’d expect from the building itself. Prices start from £32, so you can get a fragment of London’s most divisive architecture without needing planning permission.
Sat 12th – Sun 20th September 2026
Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London EC2Y 8DS
made.com
Flukette: Housewarming
Flukette has turned its Portobello Road space into an actual house you can wander through, styled room by room with handcrafted pieces from Moroccan artisans. Make yourself at home in the café corner doing a one-off collaboration with Barnaby Bars, or join in with the candle-making bar running Friday to Sunday where you build your own scent to take away in a Flukette cup.
Tue 15th – Sun 20th September 2026, 10am–6pm
353 Portobello Road, Notting Hill, London W10 5SA
londondesignfestival.com
The Speaking Oasis by Azaz Architects
Shahad Alazzaz of Azaz Architects spends the festival asking what palm weaving can do beyond baskets. They’ve worked with date palm fibre from Saudi Arabia’s al-Hasa oasis – the largest of its kind in the world – across art, architecture and product design. Backed by the Ithra Palm Initiative, it treats a genuinely ancient material as a live design proposition rather than a heritage footnote. Tucked into the Brompton Design District, it’s easy to miss, but worth the detour.
Mon 14th – Sun 20th September 2026
The Lavery, 4 Cromwell Place, London SW7 2JE
londondesignfestival.com
The Art of Sound featuring Max Cooper & Chris Watson
Wapping Hydraulic Power Station reopens for the first time in thirteen years, and L-Acoustics has filled the 1890 building with two spatial sound pieces built for the room rather than played into it. Max Cooper reworks his Royal Albert Hall commission into Feeling Is Structure, a twenty-minute piece that moves around you; Chris Watson’s Trent Falls takes you down the Humber estuary from Goole docks to Spurn Point using field recordings alone.
Fri 11th – Tue 15th September 2026
Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, Wapping Wall, London E1W 3SF
londondesignfestival.com
