Natural History Museum — science museum
Image by DenisDoukhan from Pixabay

Natural History Museum

  • 2 min read
  • 51.496° N 0.176° W

Interesting facts

  • Workmen building the 1938 life-size blue whale model left a trapdoor in its belly for secret cigarette breaks, and sealed coins and a telephone directory inside.
  • The museum holds the Ostro Stone, a flawless blue topaz of 9,381 carats, about 2 kilograms, described as the largest of its kind.
  • Archie, the 8.62-metre giant squid, was caught alive near the Falkland Islands in 2004 and kept undissected in a tank built by the team that made Damien Hirst's.
  • Hope, the blue whale skeleton now in Hintze Hall, spent over four decades in storage after its 1891 stranding before it could first be displayed in 1934.
  • Dippy, the Diplodocus cast, arrived in 36 crates, and Andrew Carnegie paid for further copies across Europe and Latin America, making it the world's most-viewed dinosaur skeleton.
  • Early curators were notoriously careless: by 1833 not one of the 5,500 insects listed in Sloane's catalogue survived, and one keeper periodically burned specimens.
  • When the shell collection of Hugh Cuming arrived, open trays were carried across a courtyard in a gale and the labels blew away, a loss it never fully recovered from.
  • A cross-section of a giant sequoia about 1,300 years old has been on show at the museum since 1893.
  • The collection holds the only surviving great auk from the British Isles, taken on Papa Westray in Orkney in 1813.
  • Darwin, Wallace and Huxley signed an 1866 petition for the museum's independence from the British Museum, but it took until 1963 to be granted.

Why it is worth it

South Kensington's great terracotta building was designed as a cathedral of nature, and it still reads like one. Alfred Waterhouse took over the commission after Captain Francis Fowke, winner of the 1864 design competition, died in 1865, and reworked it in his own round-arched Romanesque manner. Construction ran from 1873 to 1880 and the museum opened on 18 April 1881. Waterhouse clad the building inside and out in terracotta tiles, chosen to shrug off the soot of Victorian London, and filled them with relief sculptures of plants and animals: living species in the west wing, extinct ones in the east, a division Richard Owen, the museum's founding spirit, specifically asked for. Look closely and you will find a few deliberate slips, such as bats among the fossils.

The collections grew out of those of the physician Sir Hans Sloane, bought for the nation in the 18th century and first shown in the British Museum in Bloomsbury. Owen, appointed superintendent of the natural history departments in 1856, pressed for a separate building and for a museum open to everyone. Today some 80 million specimens are held across botany, entomology, mineralogy, palaeontology and zoology, among them material collected by Charles Darwin, and the museum remains a working research centre in taxonomy and conservation. It only formally shed the name British Museum (Natural History) in 1992.

The central Hintze Hall is the moment everyone remembers. For more than a century it was the home of Dippy, a cast of a Diplodocus skeleton given by Andrew Carnegie and unveiled in 1905; since 2017 the vault has been filled instead by Hope, the real skeleton of a young blue whale that stranded at the mouth of Wexford Harbour in 1891. Beyond it the galleries are colour-coded into zones. Highlights include the first Archaeopteryx specimen ever found, early ichthyosaur and plesiosaur fossils discovered by Joseph and Mary Anning, the most complete Stegosaurus skeleton known, a Moon rock from Apollo 16, and a mineral gallery that deliberately keeps its 19th-century display cases. In the Darwin Centre the spirit collections are stored in alcohol, including an 8.62-metre giant squid kept behind the scenes.

The building sits on the axis that runs north past Imperial College and the Royal Albert Hall to the Albert Memorial, the cluster of Victorian institutions Londoners nicknamed Albertopolis.

Getting there

The museum stands on Cromwell Road in South Kensington, about 1 km from Chelsea, with a second entrance on Exhibition Road. The closest London Underground station is South Kensington, from which a pedestrian tunnel leads to the entrances of the Natural History Museum and its neighbours. The nearest airport by distance is London City Airport (LCY), around 16 km away.

Plan your visit

We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.

Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in England 93The Most Beautiful Places in the United Kingdom 154The Most Beautiful 19th-Century Buildings in the United Kingdom 5The Most Remarkable Science Museums in England 6The Most Remarkable Museums Seen on Screen in the United Kingdom 6The Most Remarkable Museums in the United Kingdom 7The Most Remarkable Science Museums in the United Kingdom 7The Most Beautiful Buildings Seen on Screen in the United Kingdom 11The Most Remarkable 19th-Century Museums 12The Most Remarkable Science Museums 17The Most Remarkable Museums Seen on Screen 19The Most Beautiful Buildings in England 27The Most Beautiful Film Locations in England 27The Most Beautiful Buildings in the United Kingdom 28The Most Beautiful 19th-Century Buildings 28The Most Beautiful Film Locations in the United Kingdom 29The Most Beautiful Buildings Seen on Screen 47The Most Remarkable Museums 93The Most Beautiful Film Locations 221The Most Beautiful Buildings 286

From the encyclopaedia

The Natural History Museum in London, England, is a museum that exhibits a vast range of specimens from various segments of natural history. It is one of three major museums on Exhibition Road in South Kensington, the others being the Science Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Natural History Museum's main frontage, however, is on Cromwell Road.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

51.49611, -0.17611per Wikidata