British Museum

The British Museum, in the Bloomsbury district of London, was founded in 1753 as the first public national museum in the world and opened to visitors in 1759. It grew from the collection of the physician Sir Hans Sloane, who left some 71,000 objects to the nation, and it now holds about eight million objects covering human history from its earliest tools to the present. It is among the most visited museums in Britain.

The building is a work of Greek Revival architecture by Sir Robert Smirke, completed in the 1840s, with 43 Ionic columns across its south front on Great Russell Street, modelled on those of the temple of Athena Polias at Priene. At its heart is the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, opened in 2000 in the old central courtyard: a glass and steel roof designed by Norman Foster's firm covers the largest covered square in Europe, with Sydney Smirke's round Reading Room of 1857 standing in the middle like a drum. For almost 150 years scholars worked in that room, until the British Library moved out in 1997.

The collection is overwhelming, so it helps to choose. The Rosetta Stone, key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, leads a vast Egyptian collection. The Assyrian reliefs from Nineveh and Nimrud show lion hunts and military campaigns in astonishing detail. From Britain come the Anglo-Saxon treasures of the Sutton Hoo ship burial, and from Mesopotamia the Standard of Ur and the Royal Game of Ur. The Parthenon sculptures, known as the Elgin Marbles, fill a gallery built for them in the 1930s.

Those sculptures are also the museum's most famous controversy. Greece has long asked for them back, and many other objects acquired during the era of British colonial expansion are subject to repatriation claims. The museum has defended keeping them as part of a universal collection; the argument is as much a part of the place as the objects themselves.

Getting there

The museum is on Great Russell Street in Bloomsbury, central London, about 1 km from Soho. Holborn Underground station, on the Central and Piccadilly lines, is a few minutes' walk away, and Tottenham Court Road and Russell Square are also close. London City Airport (LCY) is about 13 km away.