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The museums, the machines and the men and women who worked it out: laboratories kept as they were, beam engines under steam, the tunnel, the barrier, the roofs, and the plaques on the houses where the ideas came.
A cathedral of terracotta animals with a blue whale diving through the nave, free, and the finest building in South Kensington.
MuseumsNatural historyGo insideFree
Also in Museums and Architecture.
The Natural History Museum began as the natural history half of the British Museum, which grew out of Sir Hans Sloane's collection of plants, skeletons and curiosities bought for the nation in 1753, and it was Richard Owen, the palaeontologist who coined the word dinosaur, who won it a home of its own. Alfred Waterhouse's building on Cromwell Road opened in 1881, faced inside and out in terracotta because the tiles shrugged off London soot, and every surface carries a modelled animal or plant, living species on the west side and extinct ones on the east. It has been called a cathedral of nature since it opened; it remained legally part of the British Museum until 1963 and kept that name until 1992.
The collection is about 80 million specimens, Darwin's among them, and the museum is as much a research institute as a show: the Darwin Centre's eight-storey Cocoon holds the insects and plants and lets you watch the scientists at work. In the great hall, now Hintze Hall, the cast of the Diplodocus that Andrew Carnegie sent in 1905, Dippy, gave way in 2017 to Hope, the real skeleton of a blue whale, diving from the ceiling. The dinosaur gallery, the earthquake room and the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition draw the longest queues. Entry is free.
| Monday | 10:00 – 17:30 |
|---|---|
| Tuesday | 10:00 – 17:30 |
| Wednesday | 10:00 – 17:30 |
| Thursday | 10:00 – 17:30 |
| Friday | 10:00 – 17:30 |
| Saturday | 10:00 – 17:30 |
| Sunday | 10:00 – 17:30 |
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.