The British Museum

What the museum was, and what has left it

The British Museum was founded in 1753 on the collection of Sir Hans Sloane and opened to the public in 1759 at Montagu House in Bloomsbury, on the site the museum still occupies. It is therefore over two hundred and seventy years old, not the two hundred and fifty of older accounts.

Two large parts of it have since gone. The natural history collections moved to South Kensington in the 1880s, became a separate institution under the British Museum Act 1963 and took the name Natural History Museum in 1992. The library left under legislation of 1972, became part of the British Library, and physically moved to St Pancras in 1997. That second departure matters architecturally as well as institutionally, because it emptied the middle of the building.

Smirke's building, and the court at the centre of it

Robert Smirke's quadrangle was built between 1823 and 1847 and is listed Grade I, as it has been since October 1951. The south front is the one everybody photographs: a Greek Revival range with an eight-column Ionic portico, the order copied from the Temple of Athena Polias at Priene, and a pediment carved by Richard Westmacott under the title The Progress of Civilisation.

Behind the portico, the courtyard Smirke left at the centre was filled in from 1852 with the circular Reading Room and the bookstacks around it, and stayed filled for a hundred and forty-five years. When the library moved out in 1997 the space came free. It was roofed with a glass and steel canopy by Foster and Partners and opened on 6 December 2000 as the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, about two acres under cover, with the Reading Room standing free in the middle of it.

The Reading Room itself, by Sydney Smirke and dating from the 1850s, has had an interrupted recent history. It closed to the public in 2013, was used as the museum's archive, opened for ticketed tours from 2023, and reopened to general visitors on 1 July 2024. It is not listed among the museum's galleries, so it should not be relied on to be open on any particular day.

The Rosetta Stone

The stone reached Portsmouth in February 1802 and was presented to the museum by George III that July — 1802, not the 1801 of older accounts, which is the year of the treaty that surrendered it. It is dated 196 BC, and carries one decree in two languages and three scripts: fourteen lines of hieroglyphs, thirty-two of demotic and fifty-four of Greek. The parallel Greek text is what made the hieroglyphs legible.

It is indoors, in the Egyptian sculpture gallery, Room 4, on the ground floor. Accounts that place it outside the building are simply wrong.

The Parthenon sculptures

These are the museum's most contested holding, and the history of how they arrived is routinely garbled. Lord Elgin was British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, which then ruled Greece. He obtained a permit from the Ottoman authorities and had about half the surviving sculptures removed between 1801 and 1805. In 1816 a parliamentary select committee examined his conduct, found it lawful, and the sculptures passed into the collection by Act of Parliament — so 1816 is the year the nation bought them from Elgin, not the year Elgin bought them from anyone. The museum calls them the Parthenon sculptures and shows them in Room 18. The gallery was built in 1938 to a design by John Russell Pope, bombed in 1940, and left derelict until the sculptures returned to it in 1962.

Greece first formally asked for their permanent return in 1983. The museum's position is that the British Museum Act 1963 prevents the trustees from giving them up, that it would consider a loan request on its ordinary terms, and that it wants what it calls a new Parthenon partnership. In October 2026 its chairman said publicly that he wanted an agreement within about three years and suggested the sculptures might be shown alternately in London and Athens, adding that Parliament could change the law if it chose. The Greek government has rejected any arrangement that would imply recognition of the trustees' ownership, a position its prime minister restated in September 2026. No decision is scheduled. Separately, the sculptures will have to be shown somewhere else in the building while the west of the museum is rebuilt, with or without an agreement.

Sutton Hoo, Mildenhall and the British rooms

The Sutton Hoo material of the seventh century — the helmet, the shield and the rest of the ship burial — is in Room 41. The fourth-century Roman silver of the Mildenhall Treasure belongs to the Roman Britain collection, as does much of the material older accounts place in named galleries that have since changed sponsor.

A warning on room numbers generally: the museum's own gallery index and its own printed plan do not agree with each other across much of the building, differing by one place over whole runs of rooms. Only a handful of numbers can be confirmed from both. Anything else should be taken from the floor plan on the day.

Lindow Man

Older accounts carry a heavily visited body they call the Peat Marsh man, found by archaeologists in a Cheshire peat marsh and described as a first-century victim of ritual sacrifice. Almost every part of that is slightly off. He is Lindow Man; he was found on 1 August 1984 at Lindow Moss near Wilmslow, which is a raised bog rather than a marsh; and he was found not by archaeologists but by men cutting peat commercially, one of whom spotted a foot on a shredding machine. Radiocarbon dating puts him between 2 BC and AD 119.

That he died violently is not in doubt: his skull was fractured by a blow, there are ligature marks at the neck, and a broken neck is the likeliest fatal injury. That he was ritually sacrificed is an interpretation, and a disputed one — it has been argued for as a threefold ritual killing, argued against by historians of religion, and explained instead as a violent robbery. The museum's own former curator of the material has said the question remains open. A reference account should say he was killed, and say that why is unsettled.

The thefts, and what followed

The museum's recent history has been dominated by a loss from its own stores, and the sequence is worth setting out plainly because it is usually compressed into a single year. A scholar of engraved gems raised suspicions in 2021; an internal inquiry wrongly concluded there was nothing in them. An audit from April 2022 found objects missing, the concerns were escalated in December 2022, and the chairman called in the police. The matter became public in August 2023, when a member of staff was dismissed and an independent review commissioned. The director resigned with immediate effect on 25 August 2023.

The review reported on 30 November 2023. It found that about two thousand items had been damaged or had gone: some fifteen hundred missing or stolen, around three hundred and fifty with their gold mounts removed, and about a hundred and forty damaged by tool marks. Most were unregistered gems and jewellery. Three hundred and fifty-one items had been returned by that December, and the total recovered had reached six hundred and twenty-six by May 2024. The review made thirty-six recommendations, all accepted, among them establishing what the collection actually consists of, registering the unregistered, rebuilding the risk register and strengthening inventory checks and trustee oversight. Its findings on security were withheld. The museum began civil proceedings in March 2024 against the dismissed curator, who filed a defence disputing the claim; he was under police investigation and had not been charged. A new director was named in March 2024 and took office that June.

The masterplan

A ten-year plan for the building was announced on 19 December 2023, alongside a ten-year partnership with BP worth fifty million pounds — the museum's largest corporate sponsorship, and opposed by campaigners who object to oil money in museums. Its main element is the redevelopment of the Western Range: every gallery west of the Great Court, covering ancient Greece, Egypt, Rome, Assyria and the Middle East, which amounts to about a third of the museum's gallery space and some ten separate structures added to Smirke's quadrangle over two centuries. A competition launched in May 2024 and the practice Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture was appointed in February 2025.

Three dated commitments sit alongside it: a new energy centre, funded by the Treasury and due to complete in 2030; a reworking of the forecourt and entrance pavilions, hoped for early in 2027; and the digital cataloguing of the whole collection by 2029. A thirty-million-pound gift from an unnamed donor was reported in October 2026. Neither a total cost for the Western Range nor a completion date has been published, and galleries will close in phases without those dates being given either, so anyone planning a visit around a particular collection should check before setting out.

Admission and getting there

Entry is free. A free timed ticket can be booked in advance and gives priority at busy periods; entry without one depends on capacity. Exhibitions are ticketed separately. There are two entrances, on Great Russell Street and on Montague Place. The museum publishes no list of nearest Underground stations and points enquirers to the journey planner instead; four stations lie within a short walk, of which Russell Square, the one older accounts name, is the least well connected.