This September, a group of artists, many of them based here in South London, are taking over The Old Waiting Room at Peckham Rye Station for a five-day exhibition called THE WAY. It’s the vaulted Victorian room above the ticket hall and most people passing through Peckham Rye Station have no idea it’s there.
The artists are showing work built on a single idea: the small, easily missed turning points in a life, the ordinary fork you only notice once you’ve already passed it. The show spans painting, installation, sculpture, sound and moving images, and runs as part of the London Design Festival. Entry is free and there’s no need to book.
OMMFA is a decentralised arts organisation (a registered CIC) and this is one of their biggest projects to date, staged right in the heart of Peckham.
The exhibition is arranged without a fixed route. There is no chronology, no thematic grouping, and no argument that resolves at the far wall. Visitors arrive at the works in whatever order the room permits, which is closer to how these moments are encountered in a life than any sequence a curator might impose. Three of the thirty-eight artists work in live form, placing part of the exhibition on a schedule rather than on a wall.
THE WAY does not ask what a life amounts to, nor does it treat the individual as a case study for a larger condition. It asks what a life pivoted on, and accepts that the answer is usually too small to be defended in public: a contract that ended, a language never shared, a body that changed without asking.
Located above the ticket hall of Peckham Rye Station, the Old Waiting Room was designed by Charles Henry Driver and completed in 1865. It has been a waiting area for around a hundred commuters at a time, a billiard room for station staff, and a venue for illicit raves, while also remaining closed and disused for decades, even as trains continued to run beneath it. Since its restoration it has re-emerged as a space that opens intermittently for art.
The Artists:
Agak-Agak Unit, Ai Deng, Aida Pouryeganeh, Ben Adamson, Chiemi Haraguchi, Elina Browerman, Fatima Ezzahra Rezqi, Feng Zhao, Gianluca Iadema, Huilin Li, Jianqiang (Vincent) Xia, Jie Dong, Joy Wang, Kengo Horikoshi, Laia Sarukhan, Margaret Bruton, Maxim Lester, Millieon Hu, Muchuan, Nadiia Rom, Polina Filippova, Qi Shi, R James Healy, Rachel Romanowsky, Sarunas Berinas, Sijie Lyu, Sue Kite, Suwei Xia, Tyrone Moreno, Xinde Ren, Yiming Sun, Yixuan You, Yujia Yang, Zhiying Chen, Zishi Tu (Yuxi Chen)
Dates: 15–19 September 2026, daily 10:00–18:00
Location: The Old Waiting Room, Peckham Rye Station, SE15 4RX
Price: Free, no booking
Private view: evening of 18 September 18:00–21:00
Full details: https://ommfa.org/projects/london-design-festival-2026
Website (https://ommfa.org/projects/london-design-festival-2026)
The LDF site (https://londondesignfestival.com/activities/the-way-38-kinds-of-lives-in-an-old-waiting-room)
