British Museum

• 1. Introduction

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  The British Museum holds eight million objects from every corner of the world and every period of human history. That figure alone is staggering, but it barely captures the institution's scale. On a single afternoon in 2025, more than seventeen thousand people walked through its doors, contributing to a year-end total of 6,440,120 visitors. What draws them all to a set of neoclassical buildings in Bloomsbury, London? The answer involves a physician's dying wish, centuries of colonisation, a handful of objects that remain at the centre of diplomatic disputes to this day, and an ambition that was, from the very first, unlike anything the world had seen before. This documentary traces how a collection of curiosities bequeathed by one eccentric scientist became the world's first public national museum, and what that origin story still means for the institution today.

• 2. A Doctor's Dying Wish

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  Sir Hans Sloane was born in 1660 in Ulster and built a career as a London-based physician and naturalist. His marriage to the widow of a wealthy Jamaican planter gave him the financial means to pursue an obsession: collecting. By the time he died in 1753, Sloane had amassed around 71,000 objects covering almost every category of knowledge. There were some 40,000 printed books, 7,000 manuscripts, 337 volumes of dried plants, prints and drawings that included works by Albrecht Durer, and antiquities reaching from Sudan and Egypt to Greece, Rome, and the Americas. Sloane did not want his collection broken apart after his death. He bequeathed it to King George II and to the nation for a payment of £20,000 to his heirs, a figure he deliberately set well below the estimated value of the artefacts, which contemporary sources placed at £50,000 or more, and some at £80,000 or more. On the 7th of June 1753, King George II gave royal assent to the Act of Parliament that formally established the British Museum. Two other great libraries were folded in alongside Sloane's material: the Cottonian Library, assembled by Sir Robert Cotton and dating to Elizabethan times, and the Harleian Library, gathered by Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Mortimer. A fourth collection, the Royal manuscripts, joined them in 1757. Together these foundation collections included the Lindisfarne Gospels and the sole surviving manuscript of Beowulf.

• 3. A New Kind of Museum

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  Montagu House, a converted 17th-century mansion, was chosen as the museum's first home, purchased from the Montagu family for £20,000. The trustees had also considered Buckingham House, which would later become Buckingham Palace, but rejected it on grounds of cost and unsuitable location. On the 15th of January 1759, the first exhibition galleries and reading room for scholars opened to the public. At the time, the library occupied most of the ground floor while natural history filled an entire wing on the first floor. What made this institution genuinely radical was the principle behind it: national in character, belonging to neither church nor king, freely open to all, and aiming to collect everything. No institution quite like it had existed before. In 1763 the trustees hired Daniel Solander, a former student of Carl Linnaeus, to reclassify the natural history collection according to the Linnaean system, positioning the museum as a public centre of learning for European naturalists. The first significant antiquities arrived in 1772, when the museum purchased Sir William Hamilton's first collection of Greek vases for £8,410. George IV donated the King's Library, a personal collection assembled by George III comprising 65,000 volumes along with 19,000 pamphlets, maps, and topographical drawings, in 1823. Parliament simultaneously granted the right to a copy of every book published in Britain, guaranteeing that the library would grow indefinitely.

• 4. Conquest and Collection

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  The museum's expansion over the following two and a half centuries was, in large part, a product of British colonisation. Egyptian sculpture arrived in bulk after British forces defeated the French at the Battle of the Nile in 1801; the Rosetta Stone, presented by King George III in 1802, was among those acquisitions. Henry Salt, appointed British consul general in Egypt, assembled major holdings, beginning with the Colossal bust of Ramesses II in 1818, which were then purchased by the British Museum and the Musee du Louvre. Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin and ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1799 to 1803, removed large marble sculptures from the Parthenon on the Acropolis of Athens. The British Museum acquired them in 1816 under the British Museum Act 1816. In the 1840s and 1850s, excavations in Assyria by A. H. Layard at Nimrud and Nineveh brought entire suites of alabaster palace reliefs to London. Layard later uncovered the Palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh with what he described as no fewer than seventy-one halls. His assistant Hormuzd Rassam subsequently discovered the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal, a collection of cuneiform tablets that today numbers around 130,000 pieces. The Elgin Marbles and the Rosetta Stone remain at the centre of repatriation debates that have not been resolved. Both Greece and Egypt continue to pursue long-term claims for their return.

• 5. Building and Rebuilding

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  Sir Robert Smirke's neoclassical design, with its Greek Revival facade facing Great Russell Street featuring 43 columns in the Ionic order standing 45 feet high, gradually replaced the original Montagu House. Construction began with the East Wing in 1823-1828 and continued through several phases until the great south colonnade was completed in 1847. The pediment over the main entrance was decorated with sculptures by Sir Richard Westmacott depicting The Progress of Civilisation, fifteen allegorical figures installed in 1852. The Round Reading Room, designed by Smirke's brother Sydney and completed in 1857, measured 140 feet in diameter, making it at the time the second widest dome in the world after the Pantheon in Rome, and offered space for a million books. In 1931 the art dealer Sir Joseph Duveen offered funds to build a dedicated gallery for the Parthenon sculptures. Designed by the American architect John Russell Pope and completed in 1938, the Duveen Gallery was hit by a bomb in 1940 and remained semi-derelict for twenty-two years. On the night of the 10th to the 11th of May 1941 several incendiaries fell on the south-west corner, destroying the book stack and 150,000 books. The building that stands today covers an area of over 92,000 square metres, with nearly one hundred galleries representing two miles of exhibition space. Yet despite this scale, less than one percent of the entire collection is on public display at any given time, approximately 50,000 items out of more than 13 million.

• 6. Great Court and Modern Era

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  The departure of the British Library to its new building at St Pancras, finally completed in 1998, freed the vast central quadrangle of Smirke's original design. The space was transformed into the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, designed by engineers Buro Happold and architects Foster and Partners. It opened in December 2000 and became the largest covered square in Europe. The roof is a glass and steel structure built by an Austrian steelwork company, incorporating 1,656 uniquely shaped panes of glass. At the centre of the new Great Court stood the former Reading Room, its library functions now relocated to St Pancras. The same year the museum was awarded National Heritage Museum of the Year. The Great Court, while praised for improving circulation, drew criticism for providing little additional exhibition space at a time when the museum faced serious financial difficulties. A partial remedy came later with the £135 million World Conservation and Exhibitions Centre, announced in July 2007 and designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners. It was completed in time for a Viking exhibition in March 2014 and was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize for architectural excellence in 2017. In 2022-23, the museum's website drew 27 million visits, a substantial rise from 19.5 million visits in 2013. The museum also maintains an online database that held nearly 4,500,000 individual object entries in 2,000,000 records at the start of 2023. A purpose-built off-site storage facility near Reading, the British Museum Archaeological Collection, opened in 2024.

• 7. Objects in Dispute

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  Augustus Wollaston Franks joined the museum's staff in 1851 and began expanding its collecting reach into British and European medieval antiquities, prehistory, Asia, and ethnography. When Franks died in 1897, he left an immense personal bequest to the institution: 3,300 finger rings, 153 drinking vessels, 512 pieces of continental porcelain, 1,500 netsuke, 850 inro, over 30,000 bookplates, and miscellaneous jewellery and plate, among them the Oxus Treasure. The following year, Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild bequeathed the Waddesdon Bequest, almost 300 pieces from his New Smoking Room at Waddesdon Manor, including the Holy Thorn Reliquary, probably created in the 1390s in Paris for John, Duke of Berry. The baron's will was precise: the collection must be kept in a dedicated room called the Waddesdon Bequest Room, separate from the rest of the museum's holdings forever. Those terms are still observed today, and the collection occupies room 2a. Yet for all the richness of such gifts, the museum's most prominent objects continue to attract controversy. The Parthenon sculptures, known as the Elgin Marbles, and the Rosetta Stone sit within the museum's galleries while Greece and Egypt maintain active repatriation claims. The museum holds these objects under terms that currently prevent their permanent transfer abroad, a legal constraint that shapes every diplomatic conversation about their future.