Natural History Museum, London

• 1. Introduction

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  The Natural History Museum in London holds roughly 80 million specimens, making it one of the largest collections of its kind anywhere on Earth. Most visitors never see the overwhelming majority of them. They walk through the grand entrance on Cromwell Road, look up at a blue whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling of Hintze Hall, and assume that is the museum. It is not even close to the whole story.

  The building itself was once dismissed as ungodly. The collections it houses were nearly destroyed by their own curators. The institution spent nearly a century fighting for the right to call itself independent. And a Scottish-American industrialist once paid to have its most famous resident shipped across the Atlantic in 36 crates. How a collection of dried plants and animal bones, stored in Bloomsbury in the mid-eighteenth century, became the pre-eminent centre of natural history research in the world is a story of chaos, stubbornness, and a great deal of scientific ambition.

• 2. A Troubled Beginning

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  Sir Hans Sloane, an Ulster doctor who lived from 1660 to 1753, left behind a collection so vast and varied that the British Government bought it at a price below its actual market value. That purchase was funded by a lottery. Sloane's holdings, which included dried plants and animal and human skeletons, went into Montagu House in Bloomsbury in 1756, becoming the seed of the British Museum.

  What followed was an institutional catastrophe by degrees. Dr George Shaw, Keeper of Natural History from 1806 to 1813, sold specimens to the Royal College of Surgeons and held periodic cremations of material in the museum grounds. By 1833, an Annual Report recorded that of the 5,500 insects listed in the original Sloane catalogue, not one remained. The Treasury grew so alarmed by the departments' inability to preserve anything that it refused to entrust them with specimens collected at the government's own expense.

  The hiring was no better than the housekeeping. In 1862, a nephew of a Trustee's mistress was appointed Entomological Assistant despite being unable to distinguish a butterfly from a moth. The Keeper of Zoology from 1840 to 1874, J. E. Gray, catalogued the mental deterioration of colleagues alongside the specimens he was supposed to protect. One staff member removed every label and registration number from entomological cases arranged by a rival. When Gray's wife carried the open trays of the conchologist Hugh Cuming's collection across a courtyard in a gale, all the labels blew away. That collection, the source notes, is said never to have recovered.

  The Principal Librarian of the time, Antonio Panizzi, held science in contempt and actively discouraged the public from visiting the natural history exhibits. In 1835, the museum's own senior staff told a parliamentary select committee they fully approved of that policy. The palaeontologist Richard Owen, appointed Superintendent of the natural history departments in 1856, began to correct these faults. His reforms would eventually lead the writer Bill Bryson to observe that Owen had transformed expectations of what museums are for by making the institution accessible to everyone.

• 3. Building the Cathedral

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  Owen recognised that the natural history collections needed a building of their own. In 1864, a design competition attracted thirty-three submissions, many of them working in Renaissance styles. The winning entry came from the civil engineer Captain Francis Fowke, who died in December 1865 before any work could begin. Rather than hand the commission to the runner-up, which was judged disrespectful to Fowke's memory, the project went to Alfred Waterhouse, hired in February 1866.

  Waterhouse revised the agreed plans substantially and designed the facades in what he called an idiosyncratic Romanesque style, drawn from frequent visits to the Continent. His initial estimate of approximately £495,000 was renegotiated down to £330,000. Wings that had been planned for either side of the main building were cut for budgetary reasons; those spaces are now occupied by the Earth Galleries and the Darwin Centre.

  Construction began in 1873 and finished in 1880. The museum opened on the 18th of April 1881, though the full move from Bloomsbury was not completed until 1883. The building attracted both admiration and criticism at the time, but most commentators saw it as a benefit to the public.

  To resist the sooty Victorian London atmosphere, the interiors and exteriors were clad extensively in architectural terracotta tiles manufactured by Gibbs and Canning, a company based in Tamworth. The tiles carry relief sculptures of flora and fauna, with living species in the west wing and extinct ones in the east wing. Owen requested this division explicitly, and scholars have read it as his riposte to Darwin's argument linking present and past species through natural selection. Waterhouse did introduce a few anomalies: bats appear among the extinct animals, and a fossil ammonite sits beside the living species. The clay models for the sculptures were made by a French sculptor working in London, identified in the records as M Dujardin, from drawings prepared by Waterhouse himself. The central axis of the building aligns with the tower of Imperial College London, the Royal Albert Hall, and the Albert Memorial to the north, all part of the complex known colloquially as Albertopolis.

• 4. The Long Fight for Independence

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  Even after the Waterhouse building opened, the museum remained legally a department of the British Museum, carrying the official name British Museum (Natural History), abbreviated in the scientific literature as B.M.(N.H.). In 1866, a petition asking for independence was sent to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It was signed by the heads of the Royal, Linnean, and Zoological societies, as well as by Darwin, Wallace, and Huxley. Heated debate continued for nearly a hundred years.

  The British Museum Act 1963 finally granted the natural history collections their own board of trustees, though despite an amendment proposed in the House of Lords, the old name was retained. The museum began publicly calling itself the Natural History Museum in 1989 and dropped the British Museum (Natural History) title from its advertising and general-reader books. Only when the Museums and Galleries Act 1992 passed did the formal name change to the Natural History Museum, ending a dispute that had run since well before the Waterhouse building was even designed.

  A parallel expansion arrived in 1985, when the museum merged with the adjacent Geological Museum of the British Geological Survey. The Geological Museum had become world-famous for displays including an active volcano model and an earthquake machine designed by James Gardner, and it housed what is described as the world's first computer-enhanced exhibition, called Treasures of the Earth. When the galleries were completely rebuilt and reopened in 1996 as The Earth Galleries, the Waterhouse building's galleries were renamed The Life Galleries. The central atrium design, credited to Neal Potter, pulled visitors upward through a model of the Earth mounted on an escalator, covering previously reluctant upper-gallery visitors.

• 5. Dippy, Hope, and the Central Hall

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  On the 12th of May 1905, a 105-foot-long replica of a Diplodocus carnegii skeleton was unveiled in the museum's central hall to considerable public and media attention. The cast had been a gift from the Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who arranged it after a conversation with King Edward VII, then a keen trustee of the British Museum. Carnegie paid £2,000 for the casting, which copied the original held at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. At the time of the London unveiling, the Pittsburgh museum was still being built to house the real fossil.

  As word spread, Carnegie paid to have additional copies made for display in most major European capitals and in Central and South America, making the replica, affectionately nicknamed Dippy, the most-viewed dinosaur skeleton in the world. It appeared in a 1975 Disney comedy called One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing and became so closely associated with the museum that its eventual removal was national news.

  After 112 years on display, Dippy was taken down in early 2017 and replaced by the actual skeleton of a blue whale, nicknamed Hope. Hope was 128 years old at the time of installation. The whale had been found stranded on sandbanks at the mouth of Wexford Harbour, Ireland, in March 1891, injured by whalers. Its skeleton had been in storage for 42 years before it was first displayed in 1934, when the New Whale Hall was built to accommodate it. During the construction of a life-sized whale model in the same hall, completed in 1938, workmen left a trapdoor in the whale's stomach for surreptitious cigarette breaks. Before it was sealed for good, coins and a telephone directory were placed inside, a detail that grew into an urban myth about a time capsule.

  The process of removing Dippy and installing Hope was filmed for a BBC Television documentary in the Horizon series, narrated by David Attenborough and first broadcast on BBC Two on the 13th of July 2017, the day before Hope was opened to the public. Dippy went on a tour of British museums beginning in 2018 and concluded at Norwich Cathedral in 2020.

• 6. The Darwin Centre and Archie

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  The Darwin Centre, named after Charles Darwin, was designed to house tens of millions of preserved specimens alongside working space for scientific staff and new visitor experiences. It was built in two phases adjoining the Waterhouse building, the most significant development project in the museum's history according to the institution itself.

  Phase one opened to the public in 2002, housing the zoological department's spirit collections: organisms preserved in alcohol. Phase two was unveiled in September 2008 and opened to the general public in September 2009. It was designed by the Danish practice C. F. Moller Architects in the form of a giant eight-story cocoon and holds the entomology and botanical dry collections.

  The centre's most famous resident is a giant squid taken alive in a fishing net near the Falkland Islands in 2004. The squid, named Archie, measures 8.62 metres. On arrival at the museum it was immediately frozen while preparations were made for permanent storage. Because complete and reasonably fresh examples of the species are rare, the museum chose wet storage rather than dissection. A 9.45-metre acrylic tank was built by the same team that supplies tanks to the artist Damien Hirst, and Archie was preserved using a mixture of formalin and saline solution. Archie is not on general display; visitors who want to see the squid and other non-exhibited items can book a paid Spirit Collection Tour, offered several times each day.

• 7. A Collection of Firsts

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  Beyond the headline exhibits, the museum holds a number of objects that carry the distinction of being first. Joseph Anning discovered the first complete ichthyosaur skull ever found, in 1811. His sister Mary Anning found the first complete skeleton of a plesiosaur ever discovered, in 1823. The museum also holds the first specimen of Archaeopteryx ever discovered, one of only fourteen accepted by palaeontologists as the oldest known bird.

  The collection contains the first Iguanodon teeth ever found, a near-complete Mantellisaurus skeleton, and what is described as the most complete Stegosaurus fossil skeleton ever discovered, nicknamed Sophie. Among the geological holdings is an Apollo 16 Moon rock sample collected in 1972, the Ostro Stone, a flawless blue topaz weighing 9,381 carats, and the Aurora Pyramid of Hope, a collection of 296 natural diamonds in a wide variety of colours.

  A cross-section of a giant sequoia estimated at 1,300 years old has been at the museum since 1893. The collection also holds a rare dodo skeleton reconstructed from bones described as over a thousand years old, the only surviving specimen of the Great Auk from the British Isles, collected in 1813 from Papa Westray in the Orkney Islands, and a rare first edition of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. On the museum's west lawn, a potentially new species of insect resembling Arocatus roeselii was discovered in 2007, a reminder that even the museum's grounds remain active scientific territory. In March 2026, the museum was reported as the United Kingdom's most visited attraction, with over 7.1 million visitors recorded in 2025.