The Natural History Museum

From the British Museum to South Kensington

The natural history collection began in the British Museum, with the specimens of Sir Hans Sloane, who left his collection to the nation. For decades those specimens were poorly looked after, and a great deal of Sloane's material had disappeared by the 1830s. The public was not encouraged to visit.

That changed when the palaeontologist Richard Owen took charge of the natural history departments in 1856. Owen, who coined the word dinosaur, argued that the collection needed its own building and its own purpose: to be a museum for everyone. A site was bought in South Kensington, and the new museum separated from the British Museum in law in 1963, though it was officially still called the British Museum (Natural History) until 1992.

Hintze Hall

You enter into the central hall, a vaulted space with a painted ceiling of botanical panels and a great staircase at the far end. For decades a plaster cast of a Diplodocus dominated the room. It was replaced in 2017 by the skeleton of a blue whale, hung from the ceiling in a diving pose, which gives the hall a sense of scale and motion.

Look at the arches and balusters as well, because the carved animals continue inside. Monkeys climb the columns of the main stair and the iron-framed roof rests on piers carved with fossils and plants. It is worth taking five minutes to see the decoration before heading for the galleries.

Looking closely

Spend a few minutes in the halls of fossils and early life, where the oldest specimens sit in cases beside modern relatives so that you can compare them. The mineral gallery holds crystals, meteorites and gemstones in dark cases that make them glow, and the mammal and bird galleries include specimens that have been on show for more than a century. Some of the taxidermy is old enough to be a historical document in its own right, showing how earlier generations imagined animals they had never seen alive.

The museum's research is part of the story. Scientists here describe new species, trace the movements of invasive insects and study how climate change is shifting habitats. The Darwin Centre lets visitors watch some of that work, and the museum's own website explains how the collections are used by researchers around the world.

Children tend to head straight for the dinosaurs, but older visitors often linger in the quieter rooms where a single specimen, a coral, a beetle or a long-extinct bird, gets a case to itself, with a label that tells you where it was found and who found it. Those labels, in the hands of curators, are some of the most carefully written text in London.