Helsinki City Museum is one of the most popular museums in Finland, with more than 325,000 visitors in 2025. The aim of the redesign of the customer areas is to provide an even more experiential, surprising and functional museum visit. The popular Children’s Town will remain unchanged at the request of the residents, and the City Museum will remain open to the public throughout the renovation.
Visitors and residents can already enjoy the Kasari meeting room and event spaces, which can soon be reserved for use by residents and communities through Helsinki’s shared reservation booking system at varaamo.hel.fi. The spaces are inspired by familiar places in Helsinki, such as the canopy kiosks beloved by the city’s residents. Open to all, the Picture Browsery has been decorated as a quiet reading and break room, and daycare and school groups have access to a cosy lobby area for outdoor clothing. The spaces were designed by the design agency Rune & Berg.
The exhibition spaces on the 2nd and 4th floors will be completely closed from January 2026 onwards. In February, the renovation work will continue in the entrance lobby. The reform will pay particular attention to accessibility. In line with the Helsinki City Museum’s environment programme, the installation and dismantling of temporary exhibitions will be carried out in a more sustainable way to minimise the generation of materials that cannot be reused and recycled.
Opening on Helsinki Day 12 June
The City Museum’s new main exhibition is a journey of insights and experiences into the history of Helsinki. It takes the visitor on a colourful and surprising journey through life on the shores of a northern sea, between East and West, highlighting the major developments and phenomena that have shaped Helsinki to become what it is today. The journey starts at Malminkartano and continues through changing landscapes and meetings with a variety of people from the Stone Age onwards, sailors and mademoiselles, children and characters from the seamier side of life. Finally, the visitor will ride in a taxi from the 1970s to the present. The opening event of the main exhibition will take place on Friday 12 June – on Helsinki Day, a day of celebration for the whole city.
‘The Unknown Suburb’ exhibition starts on the bus stop
The highlight of the spring is the Unknown Suburb exhibition on the 4th floor highlighting personal observations and views on “homely slab architecture”, “the refrigerator houses in Pihlajamäki” and “East Helsinki identity” from Helsinki residents who live or work in the suburbs. It deconstructs and reverses the stigmas and images associated with the suburbs and highlights their lesser-known aspects. The story begins with two-billion-year-old bedrock and ends in a 21st century suburban block of flats. Exhibition Planner Alpi Vaalaja and Graphic Designer of the Year 2025 Päivi Helander have created the visuals of the exhibition – it will open to the public on Friday 17 April.
Sámi identity in Helsinki
Helsinki Diversity and its preservation are important parts of the vision of Helsinki City Museum. The Sámi are the only indigenous people in the European Union whose history goes back thousands of years, including in the Helsinki region. Helsinki City Museum celebrates Sámi National Day on 6 February, and the Sámi exhibition will open to the public in November 2026. The exhibition is aimed at providing information and increasing appreciation of the Sámi people.
The exhibition focuses on life as a member of the Sámi community in Helsinki. Sámi identity is manifested in the city in many ways – members of the community are united by the strong ancestral roots of the Sámi people, Sámi languages and Sámi culture. The themes and material to be used in the exhibition will be selected by a team of Sámi curators: Aimo Aikio, Laura Feodoroff, Helmi Hagelin and Mari Gauriloff. The exhibition has been preceded by a new type of documentation project, in which Sámi people in Helsinki have produced material either alone or in small groups, deciding themselves on the content and documentation methods of the material and any storage media for the materials.
