The London Children’s Museum Moves and Reinvents Itself

July 8, 2025
Interviewed by Scott Briggs, AIA, Associate Principal

The London Children’s Museum (LCM) in London, Ontario was established in 1975 as Canada’s first children’s museum. After serving the London community for more than 45 years in its prior location, LCM has relocated to the city’s east side. SKOLNICK teamed with Toronto-based Reich + Petch Design International to collaborate on the interpretive planning and design of exhibit experiences for the new space, part of a former Kellogg’s cereal factory. LCM is SKOLNICK’s second children’s museum project in Canada, having completed the children’s wing at the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton in 2018. The new London Children’s Museum opened this past January.

I recently had a chance to speak with Kate Ledgley, LCM’s Executive Director, on how things have been going at the museum since opening day. I enjoyed her candor, good humor, and appreciation for the work the collective design team brought to the museum’s new facility.

Left: Kate Ledgley, Executive Director, London Children’s Museum
Center: Scott Briggs, AIA, Associate Principal, SKOLNICK
Right: London Children's Museum, at 100 Kellogg Lane, London, Ontario, CA

SB: As the London Children’s Museum has been a beloved local institution for over 40 years, how has the community responded to the new version of the museum?

KL: Overall feedback has been incredibly positive. We were a bit nervous as the museum is so entrenched in people’s memories and they have such an attachment to the former museum. In part, I attribute our success to the degree of community consultation during the development process. Because it is such a beloved institution it was important to engage with the community throughout the master planning and design process. We had children involved in creating certain parts of the museum, such as the treehouses. I think the community engagement and hopefully delivering what the community was asking for, is why the new museum has been so well received.

SB: What are visitors’ first impressions upon entry to the new museum?

KL: People seem to walk in and feel a sense of familiarity, but also the excitement that we are doing something new. We heard from one visitor that “it’s different from my childhood, but better!”. The adults feel nostalgia from the collections cases we embedded at the entrance and throughout the museum. Walking into the “Branching Out” exhibit right away is such an impressive exhibit. Some people walk into the museum and tear up! The immersive quality of the new spaces is so exciting.

”Branching Out” exhibit at the London Children's Museum

SB: The scale of the new space is very different from the former museum. Has that impacted you in terms of operations and managing the facility and exhibits?

KL: Yes, it has required more engagement from staff on the floor and more effort to tidy and reset exhibits. The STREAM water table exhibit is perhaps the most popular space in the museum and has the biggest “wow” factor, but as it is located at the far end of the museum experience and takes visitors a while to arrive there. Having spent time in our other exhibits, people often say they don’t have enough time to spend at it! I always say the water exhibit is a high maintenance but high reward exhibit! It is worth the additional work. With the immersive environments we now have, it does mean we need staff and volunteers resetting continually but we can effectively scale that to the volume of people in each space.

STREAM Water Table

SB: What was the biggest challenge you faced during the development of the new museum?

KL: Truly the biggest challenge was the pandemic in the middle of the design process. It was great we were able to develop the design virtually, but the impact [from the pandemic] on our budget was significant, adding a 35% increase to our costs. What was most disheartening was feeling that we would possibly have to scale back [the scope of the project due to the budget increase] – change the design or remove an exhibit area. We very much appreciated that the design team and the fabricators were willing to work patiently with us on value engineering, and I feel we landed at a place that still delivers on the original vision. The overall delay to the project time frame and pausing some grant opportunities also forced us to make some tough decisions. Ultimately, with the number of people coming through the doors, we probably could have built a larger museum, but financing a larger project would have been extremely challenging.

The Factory in the “Farm Works” exhibit

SB: Knowing that you had these fundraising challenges and the fact that many US cultural institutions are now faced with grants and funding being pulled from them, do you have any fundraising advice for museums that you may have learned in your process?

KL: It can be such a challenge to get people behind a vision, but until they see it, they are sometimes reluctant to commit. At one point we were faced with a decision – do we wait until we have all the funding in place before we start building? But then we really needed to get the project done and open the museum for those donors that had already committed to our project. We debated: do we take the risk and get going? We did find that we raised a significant amount of money once construction started because we could show people [what the project would become.] It’s a bit “chicken and egg” where you need the money to start building but if you start building without all the money in place you may not be able to secure the needed funds. [This approach] worked for us. Even now, people who come into the building, mostly from the corporate sector who took the hard hat tours and saw the renderings of the vision, will say the museum far exceeds their expectations! Sometimes people need to really [physically] see it, but our approach was not without risk. When the children’s museum needed final [capital campaign] funding, though we didn’t want prior donors and the community to lose confidence in the project, we did have to make a late urgent local appeal to finish the work. Ultimately, people did step forward with donations.

Dig Pit and Dig Tent in the “Unearthed” exhibit

SB: Have there been any nice surprises that have happened with visitors in the new museum?

KL: We were very pleasantly surprised by how positively people have responded to the museum. I think when you have been working on something for many years, piece by piece, you kind of lose a bit of perspective. Some of the comments we have been receiving included this from a San Francisco family: “We have been to many children’s museums, and this is one of the best we have ever been to!”. I think we were in apology mode to visitors for so long as the old location of the museum was so tired. I told the staff that we are going to have to see ourselves differently [now]; you lose perspective of your own space a bit. The Ontario Science Centre is currently closed, and at our former location we would get people from Toronto then, as well as now, saying “We wish we had something like this in Toronto”. It’s sometimes hard for us to toot our own horn, but a thread that runs through visitor comments we have received since opening is people acknowledging and appreciating the amount of attention to detail in the planning of the building and the exhibits.

“Community Roots” exhibit

SB: How many visitors have attended the museum since opening and what features or programs have proven most popular?

KL: We have had 120,000 people through the doors in the six months we have been open! At our former location we averaged 95,000 over 12 months, and we did not ever break 100,000 in the last 15 years. The Dig Pit, “Branching Out”, the ice cream parlor exhibit, the 21m (70 feet) long water table and the Factory – we have gone through so many of those yellow balls! - are very popular. But the caves exhibit [“Unearthed”] has the least engagement. Kids tend to run through it and leave, so we are trying to figure out more interactives we could add in there.

The Factory exhibit

In terms of visitors feeling a sense of belonging in the new museum, we have had a lot of positive feedback on the signage for the washrooms, which include Braille. We have had a couple of visitors post pictures [of the signage] on LinkedIn, saying “this is how you do inclusive signage”. The washrooms are gender neutral, and we also get a lot of positive responses to the feeling of both the main and auxiliary spaces such as the infant care room and the seating we have incorporated into the exhibits [for parents and caregivers]. Collectively, the feedback we have received is that these things make families feel like they belong. Building an entirely new space like this, you can rethink these things, focusing on the whole picture - space and exhibits.

Signage at London Children’s Museum. Photos by sagecomm

We were surprised when we first opened that traffic flow became a big issue. In the former museum visitors would spend maybe 2-3 hours maximum and then head out, but here, people stay all day. At first, we had timed ticketing, but the people that came in the mornings would stay all day and it [restricted] afternoon visitors from coming, so we eliminated timed ticketing. The good news is that we have been selling out every weekend since opening!

SB: Now that you have more space and new exhibits, different experiences, and a Maker Space (“Discovery Lab”), are there any things you have instituted, such as new programs in the museum that you could not do at the former location?

KL: We have had to do less programming, in that the exhibits themselves are so engaging. The Discovery Lab has been great to have as a dedicated space for messy activities. We have been mainly focused on the exhibits themselves as that IS the programming right now. There is lots of room to grow, especially for building on the Discovery Lab programming. At opening, the Discovery Lab was largely empty, and we knew we had to fill it with something. We had so many moving boxes that we just made a cardboard box city in there. The number of families that said: “my children had so much fun in that cardboard area! [laughing]”.

Discovery Lab

Some responses have been edited for length or condensed for publication.

All Photos by Cindy Blazevic unless otherwise noted

Kate shared some of the visitor response that London Children’s Museum has received:

“Everything was built with so much love and attention to detail. It is a joy not just for kids but also for parents and families visiting.”

“The new museum is absolutely beautiful. I can only imagine the amount of planning and building that must have gone into it! Thank you so much for doing this for our children.”

"Thank you for creating more than just a museum. You created a space that quietly and powerfully said, ‘You belong here. [my son] belongs here.’ And we felt that. Truly.”

“This is a huge step up from the previous location. The museum is very well curated for imaginary play and learning for children.”

“Can't say enough about this museum; all of the others lack in comparison. Our busy boys were entertained for hours!! Painting/crafting room...a whole room dedicated to water play...pretend market, pretend house, slides....it was non-stop fun! Highly suggest the dinosaur section for digging-lovers.”

“It is such an exciting place for children to explore, learn through play and showcase their imagination. From treehouses to a fire station, a public school and a market, a farm and a space center, their imaginations can run wild!”

London Children’s Museum Project Team

Exhibit Design: SKOLNICK Architecture PLLC in collaboration with Reich + Petch Design International

Architect: Cornerstone Architecture Inc.

Construction Management: Michael + Clark Construction

Structural Engineering: MTE

MEP Engineering: Vanderwesten & Rutherford Associates, Inc.

Lighting Design: Gabriel Mackinnon Lighting Design

Wayfinding Signage: sagecomm

Exhibit Fabrication: KubikMaltbie; Boss Display; Rockscapes of Canada Inc.