Soho joins the London Design Festival for the first time in the event's 24-year history, anchoring a 2026 edition that runs 12–20 September across the capital and puts radical curatorial shifts, material experimentation and a live-in student flat on the agenda.

The Design Week team has drawn on archives, press invites and insider tips to single out seven exhibitions, installations and events. Here they are.

Soho Design District

Championed by Informare, Soho becomes a standalone design district and pulls design back to the West End by activating the Heal's Building, The Soho Hotel and the Soho Lighthouse. The programming pairs established names with next-generation talent to reflect the neighbourhood's eclectic character.

Highlights include The Primitive Trilogy: founder and designer Mehmet Yilmaz Akdoğan of Stüdyo Akdoğan Furniture presents GÜDÜ (meaning "Instinct"), a dark, highly sculptural collection that occupies the space between art and furniture and explores the aesthetic perception of primitive humanity in relation to nature. Bocci unveils a new purple colourway of its 14p portable light inside an immersive, labyrinthine installation. And at the Soho Lighthouse, 21 Great Chapel Street, NHS healthcare manager and photographer Claire Davis shows Soho: People & Place, a photography exhibition capturing the raw, spontaneous rhythm of the area's characters.

The Atterbury Flat

Chelsea College of Arts (UAL) is replacing the sterile show home with the Atterbury Flat: a living, live-in archive on a site that formerly housed Millbank Prison and the Royal Army Medical College. Over 400 UAL students and alumni, directed by Creative Director Zoë Tynan-Campbell, have reimagined the two-bedroom flat into more than 100 unique objects designed to be lived with rather than exhibited behind glass. Standouts include 3D-printed botanical lamps, thermochromic furniture, custom wallpaper, a giant pencil sculpture and a coffee table crafted from 3,000 sheets of paper that weighs as much as a shipping container. Even the door handles are handcrafted.

The 2026 London Design Medals

Fashion designer Jonathan Anderson receives the flagship London Design Medal for a curatorial approach that bridges high fashion, art and craft across JW Anderson, LOEWE and Christian Dior. Anab Jain, co-founder of Superflux, takes the Design Innovation Medal for her work in speculative futures and climate-focused design. Academic and cultural historian Sir Christopher Frayling receives the Lifetime Achievement Medal for his contributions to design education, and Mimica founder Solveiga Pakštaitė earns the Emerging Design Medal for user-centered, waste-reducing tactile technologies. All four will be honoured on Monday, 14 September, at a ceremony inside the restored Palladian mansion at RH London in Mayfair.

Deniz Beck at Material Matters

Portsmouth-based conservation architect Deniz Beck makes her Material Matters debut during Shoreditch Design Week with The Shape of Memory, the culmination of a year-long R&D project on how heritage sites can yield limited-edition design objects. Gilkicker Light No.01 anchors the installation: a bespoke lamp shaped by the geometry and material history of Gosport's Fort Gilkicker. Working with artists Sally Tyrie and Pippa Charlesworth and metalsmith Craig Palmer of Spin 360, Beck used discarded fragments from the fort — stone shavings, handmade iron nails, burnt timber and debris — and altered the lamp's etched brass surface through fire to echo the fort's burnt wood. Embedded NFC tags give visitors access to digital layers of the project, including LiDAR scans of the fort's architectural memory.

Perfectly Imperfect in Brompton

Curated by British-Italian gallerist Alex Tieghi-Walker, the Brompton Design District adopts the theme Perfectly Imperfect. Instead of showing only polished products, the district invites visitors behind the curtain to celebrate experimentation, research, collaboration and the occasional failures that underpin creative practice. Over 150 designers and makers participate at venues around Cromwell Place, including Isamaya Ffrench (Studio Iron), Rafael Prieto and Zoë Chinonso Ene. The programme moves into active woodworking studios, rehearsals and Nigerian parlour-style game settings.

Unbreak Britain Billboard

Following the viral Broken Britain billboard in Liverpool in 2025, a new 48-sheet public artwork arrives on Vallance Road in Whitechapel. Elliott Starr of Belief Studio conceived it with David Johnston (Accept & Proceed) and Indy Johar (Dark Matter Labs). Described as "concrete poetry at the scale of a billboard," the work treats the Union Jack as a canvas formed entirely of text: one voice diagnoses what is broken, while a new blue typeface asks what repair might look like. A People's Assembly will invite the public to write directly over the billboard in red ink, turning a broadcast medium into a live community interface.

OOO Run Club

Morrama and TDC PR bring back the Out of Office Run Club on the morning of Thursday, 17 September, starting at Shoreditch Town Hall. Creatives, founders and journalists can join a conversational-pace 5K run or walk around East London, supported by Hylo Athletics. The premise: movement creates a better setting for conversation than a room full of name badges.

With a new district, a medal ceremony honouring Anderson, Jain, Frayling and Pakštaitė, and a billboard the public can write on, LDF 2026 shifts its centre of gravity toward process, participation and the West End.