QUEER BRITAIN REOPENS WITH NEW PROGRAMME FOR 2026

The UK’s national LGBTQ+ museum Queer Britain has reopened its doors with an entirely refreshed programme across all four galleries, marking LGBTQ+ History Month with a sweeping rehang of over 200 objects spanning protest, print culture, domestic life and sporting history.

Photography courtesy of Queer Britain

Located in Granary Square, King’s Cross, Queer Britain has steadily positioned itself as a crucial institutional anchor for queer memory in the UK. The new collections gallery is organised around six themes: Resist!, Club Kids, Queer Creativity, Body and Mind, Live, Laugh, Love, and The World Around Us.

Among the highlights: material from The Black Lesbian and Gay Centre, co-curated with filmmaker Veronica McKenzie and community collaborators; a focus on Club Kali as the UK’s first dedicated space for LGBTQ+ South Asian celebration; and work emerging from the Women’s Liberation music movement of the 1970s and 80s. A panel from the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt anchors Body and Mind in narratives of illness, grief and care that remain central to queer history .

Photography courtesy of Queer Britain

Domesticity and chosen family are foregrounded through the unconventional relationships of Bloomsbury figures Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington, while the story of Justin Fashanu — the first professional footballer to come out publicly in the UK — situates queerness within the fraught arena of national sport. Visitor feedback has shaped the thematic structure, with individual stories rotating on a rolling basis to reflect the diversity of LGBTQ+ life across Britain .

Alongside the permanent displays, 2026 will see a sequence of focused exhibitions. Queer Print (4 February – 3 May) dives into radical pre-digital publishing cultures, while 40 Years of BFI Flare traces the evolution of one of Europe’s most significant queer film festivals . Later in the year, Trans is Human — produced by Jake and Hannah Graff with portraits by Mariano Vivanco — centres the lives of thirteen trans people across the UK, and artist Ian Giles’ Everyone Involved revisits one of Britain’s earliest recorded LGBTQ+ protest songs in a cross-generational act of reanimation.

Photography courtesy of Queer Britain

Open Wednesday to Sunday, 12–6pm, 2 Granary Square, London N1C 4BH, with a “Pay What You Can” model, the museum remains independent and without public subsidy. In a cultural climate increasingly hostile to both public funding and queer visibility, the relaunch feels pointed: Queer Britain is staging an argument for continuity and archive as an act of infrastructural protest, pleasure and print.

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Emma Lee is an arts news journalist for FETCH London and specialises in art news and art market analysis.