Museum London is the bold, modern building with gleaming glass walls and shiny, curved rooftops-just look for its futuristic silver facade right at the street’s edge.
Here at the forks of the Thames River, Museum London stands like a spaceship that decided to make a pit stop in Ontario-designed by Raymond Moriyama, who also crafted wonders like the Bata Shoe Museum and Science North. Now imagine 1940: Londoners carrying dusty artifacts up the library steps, with the hope of sharing their treasures. Fast-forward through the decades, and you get a whirlwind romance-this building was born from the union of an art gallery and historical museum in 1989, after some lively courtship involving books and paintings. As you stand here, somewhere inside those walls lurk over 45,000 artifacts and 5,000 works of art, from Lawren Harris landscapes to thought-provoking pieces by Kent Monkman and Edward Burtynsky. Not to mention, in 2004, a whole collection of medical oddities joined the party-imagine the conversations between an old stethoscope and a contemporary sculpture. In 2018, the Centre of the Forks popped up, opening the doors even wider to creativity and community. So, if you hear a faint giggle, it’s probably just a painting telling a historical artifact a joke-“Why did the skeleton stay out of the art gallery? He didn’t have the guts!”
