London Museum site swarmed by giant pigeons in public art project

The future London Museum in Farringdon has been temporarily taken over by a flock of giant pigeons. It’s a mural introducing their pigeon logo (and glitter splat of shit) that the museum group announced back in 2024.

At the time, they said that the pigeon was chosen because it had been around for over a millennium in London. It wasn’t a universally well-received logo, and for many people, the pigeon is more a sign of being in an urban landscape than of being in London in particular. That New York was unveiling a giant statue of a pigeon as a local symbol of that city at the same time that the London Museum was pitching the pigeon as a distinctly London symbol didn’t really help.

But the logo has been chosen, and at the moment, the hoardings around the museum’s new Farringon building site of a home are covered in them.

The museum collaborated with 33 artists – one from each London borough- and asked them to decorate a clay pigeon to showcase their local heritage. The photos are now displayed on the hoarding.

The project feels a little like those public art trails where artists are asked to paint familiar icons — be it phone boxes, Big Ben models, or even penguins — before they’re displayed and auctioned for charity. Here, though, it’s pigeons.

Everyone will have their favourites (or none at all), but one standout is the City of London’s entry, where its famous dragon has been cleverly reimagined as a pigeon — a playful nod to both the bird’s dinosaur ancestry and the dragon’s mythic kinship.

The Pigeon Artists