The Natural History Museum

Waterhouse's building

Alfred Waterhouse's building on Cromwell Road was put up between 1873 and 1881 and opened to visitors on 18 April 1881. It is listed Grade I, and has been since April 1969. Older accounts call the style Italian Renaissance, which it is not: it is Romanesque Revival handled in Waterhouse's own idiosyncratic manner, with Gothic Revival elements, and the museum's own description reaches for both labels at once.

It is faced in buff and grey terracotta, chosen partly because it shrugged off Victorian soot in a way carved stone did not, and the material allowed a decorative scheme no stonemason would have attempted: the facade and the galleries are covered in modelled plants and animals. The arrangement is deliberate rather than ornamental. Extinct species are on the east front, living ones on the west.

Where the collection came from

The starting point was the collection of Sir Hans Sloane, physician and collector, who left it to the nation on his death in 1753 on condition that Parliament pay his heirs twenty thousand pounds — far less than it was worth — and establish a museum to which the public had free access. Parliament raised the money by lottery. The founding Act received royal assent on 7 June 1753, and from 1756 the collection was housed at Montagu House in Bloomsbury.

The natural history material moved to South Kensington when Waterhouse's building opened, but it remained part of the British Museum for another eighty years. Legal separation came with the British Museum Act 1963, which created a separate body of trustees. Even then the institution was officially styled the British Museum (Natural History) until the Museums and Galleries Act 1992 gave it the name it uses now. Three dates therefore all have a claim to being its founding: 1753, 1881 and 1963.

Hintze Hall, and what hangs in it

The great entrance hall has been called Hintze Hall since 2014, after a gift of five million pounds. Older accounts give it other names, none of them current.

What stands in it has changed, and this is where most writing about the museum is now wrong. For decades the hall held a plaster cast of a Diplodocus skeleton, known as Dippy. It was taken down in 2017, and on 13 July that year the redisplayed hall opened with the skeleton of a blue whale suspended overhead in its place. The whale is 25.2 metres long, was stranded at Wexford in Ireland in March 1891, bought that year, and had hung in the mammals hall since 1934. It is called Hope, for the recovery of blue whale populations after commercial whaling ended.

Dippy went on tour round eight British venues between 2018 and 2020, came back briefly in the autumn of 2022, and has been on loan to the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry since February 2023. That loan runs to 19 February 2027 and has already been extended once; nothing has been published about where the cast goes afterwards. What stands at South Kensington is a different object: a weatherproof bronze Diplodocus named Fern, unveiled in the gardens on 16 July 2024, with a bronze Hypsilophodon beside it.

The dinosaurs

The claim that the museum holds the largest dinosaur collection anywhere is not supportable, and the museum does not make it; what it says is that the collection is one of the most important in the world, which the specifics bear out. It holds a hundred and fifty-seven taxa, of which a hundred and fifteen are original material rather than casts, and sixty-nine type specimens — the reference examples against which a species is defined. Among them are part of the first Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever found, the first Iguanodon known to science, and Sophie, acquired in 2013 and the most complete Stegosaurus yet discovered.

The gallery still has its animatronic Tyrannosaurus, which is what most visitors remember of it. A refurbishment is planned as part of the museum's wider redevelopment, with no date published.

The gardens

The most substantial recent addition is outdoors, and older accounts have nothing on it. The Urban Nature Project reopened five acres of the museum's grounds on 18 July 2024. Visitors now arrive through the Evolution Garden, a walk through some 2.7 billion years of the Earth's history entered by way of a canyon lined with ancient stone drawn from across Britain, with the planting and geology of each period set out in sequence; the Jurassic section is where the bronze Diplodocus stands, among Wollemi pines, dwarf ginkgos and cycads. On the other side is the Nature Discovery Garden, built around British urban habitats with a sunken path running between ponds, and a purpose-built learning centre. The older Wildlife Garden was extended at the same time, roughly doubling its area of native habitat. Sensors across the site monitor what lives there by environmental DNA and by sound.

The Darwin Centre and the spirit collection

The Darwin Centre is not new, whatever older accounts say: its first phase opened to the public in 2002 and its second, the cocoon-shaped block, in September 2009. It is named in Darwin's honour rather than built around his specimens, of which it holds only a small number. Accounts crediting it with twenty-two million specimens on display confuse the stored collections with what is shown; the museum's holdings run to some eighty million items in total, and the cocoon displays a few hundred of them.

The giant squid is in the spirit collection here, not on open display. The animal is 8.62 metres long, was taken alive in a fishing net near the Falkland Islands in 2004, and is kept in a tank room seen only on a guided behind-the-scenes tour. Those tours do not always run, so it should not be counted on. The Attenborough Studio and the Centre for UK Nature are in the same building.

Galleries open and closed

What is open changes from year to year, which is the single most useful thing to know about the place. The Hall of Human Biology, which opened in 1977 and is the gallery older accounts describe as letting visitors walk through a simulated birth, closed in 2021; its space reopened on 3 April 2025 as Fixing Our Broken Planet, a permanent gallery of more than two hundred and fifty specimens and the museum's first new permanent gallery in nine years. The Creepy Crawlies gallery is closed, with a gallery for the youngest visitors due in its space in the autumn of 2027. A second-floor gallery shut since 1943 reopened on 16 September 2026 as Nature and Us, a run of about fifty objects intended to test ideas for a permanent gallery there in 2029; it closes in March 2028. The Origins gallery, dark since 2004, is to reopen as a gallery of land and air before 2031, and the old herbarium is to become a public reading room.

The redevelopment

All of this belongs to a programme of about five hundred and fifty million pounds running over eight years to 2031, the museum's hundred and fiftieth anniversary. Its largest single element is not in London at all. A collections, science and digitisation centre is being built at Thames Valley Science Park at Shinfield in Berkshire, on the University of Reading's campus, to hold about a third of the collection in purpose-built storage alongside digitisation suites and laboratories for molecular biology and ancient DNA. Some twenty-eight million specimens are to move there. The government committed two hundred and one million pounds; ground was broken on 9 September 2025; construction is expected to finish in 2027, the move to run from 2028 to 2031, and the building to be fully operational in 2031. An earlier plan to put the centre at Harwell was abandoned, so accounts naming Harwell are out of date.

Getting there

South Kensington, on the Circle, District and Piccadilly lines, is the nearest station and about five minutes away on foot. The pedestrian subway from the station is a real route and gives step-free access to the central entrance through the Subway Gate; it is the shared tunnel serving the Exhibition Road museums rather than the museum's own. Entry to the museum is free, with separate tickets for temporary exhibitions, and booking ahead is advised at busy times.