The Science Museum

Where it came from, and the separation of 1909

This museum and the Victoria and Albert were one institution for half a century, which is why they stand side by side.

The science collections began in 1857 inside the South Kensington Museum, built on material from the Royal Society of Arts and the Great Exhibition, and were enlarged in 1883 when the Patent Office Museum's contents were absorbed. They were named the Science Museum in 1885 and given a director of their own in 1893, but they remained administratively part of the same body — a sign at the science buildings read "Victoria and Albert Museum, Science Collections".

The split was settled on 26 June 1909, when the Science Museum was formally established as a separate institution and the name Victoria and Albert Museum was ruled to apply only to the art museum. That was the same day Edward VII opened the new art building next door. So 1909 is the date of the separation, not of the collections, which are half a century older, and neither museum is the parent of the other.

The building, which is not listed

The main building is Sir Richard Allison's, of the Office of Works. Construction of the East Block began in 1913, was stopped by the First World War, and the quarters now standing opened in stages between 1919 and 1928. It was built using the Coignet reinforced-concrete system, which is what makes the large column-free galleries possible, and it was conceived as the first phase of a much larger scheme that was never completed. A Children's Gallery followed in 1931, the Centre Block between 1961 and 1963, infill and further galleries in 1980, and the Wellcome Wing in 2000.

One point to get right, because it is widely stated the other way: the Science Museum is not a listed building at all. The heritage consultants who wrote its own conservation management plan say so plainly. What is listed, and what is often confused with it, is the South Kensington Subway outside — a 433-metre pedestrian tunnel of 1885, listed Grade II in 2006, whose northern exit emerges beside the museum behind a Portland stone entrance of 1915.

Rocket, and the objects that have moved

The museum's most famous exhibit is the one most likely to disappoint, because it is three hundred and fifty kilometres away.

Stephenson's Rocket left London in 2018, going first to Newcastle for the summer, then to the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, then in September 2019 to the National Railway Museum at York on a stay announced as at least a decade. Between 2023 and 2025 it moved again, to Locomotion at Shildon, so that it stayed on show while York's Station Hall was repaired. It is now back at York, in the Great Hall. Stock photographs and travel accounts still place it in South Kensington.

What is here, and verified as on display:

• Puffing Billy, in Making the Modern World, built at Wylam Colliery in 1813 and 1814. The museum calls it the world's oldest surviving steam locomotive; that is contested in the heritage literature and depends on how much original fabric counts, so it is better given as the museum's claim.
• The Apollo 10 command module, Charlie Brown — not in Exploring Space, which has closed, but in the new Space gallery on the ground floor, where it stands beside the Soyuz TMA-19M descent module, reportedly the first time the two have been shown together.
• Two Babbage engines, which need separating. The museum holds the completed portion of Difference Engine No. 1 — about two thousand parts, roughly a seventh of the design, finished in 1832 by Joseph Clement. It also holds a complete Difference Engine No. 2, which the museum itself built: the calculating section in 1991 and the printing mechanism by 2002. The second copy it made was shown for many years in California, and where it is now could not be established.
• The Whittle jet engine, in the Flight gallery. Its own collection record gives two different years for it, so the date is best omitted.
• The Watson and Crick DNA model, in Making the Modern World — but the museum's own description makes clear it is a 1977 reconstruction incorporating many of the original 1953 metal plates, not the intact original.

The galleries, and which of them charge

Entry to the museum is free, and the usual mistake is to assume that everything inside it is. Three things are charged: Wonderlab, which opened in October 2016 and has been ticketed from the start; Power Up; and the IMAX documentaries. Advance booking is cheaper for all three, and there is a reduced rate for people on certain benefits.

The free permanent galleries include the Energy Hall, with the Boulton and Watt rotative beam engine of 1788; Making the Modern World, of 2000; Information Age, opened on 24 October 2014 by Elizabeth II, who sent her first message on a social network to mark it; Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries, five galleries and more than three thousand objects, opened 16 November 2019 at a cost of twenty-four million pounds; Mathematics: The Winton Gallery, by Zaha Hadid Architects, of December 2016; Science City 1550–1800, of 2019; Technicians, of 2022; Energy Revolution, of March 2024; the Space gallery of September 2025; and Flight, which has been there since 1963.

The attrition is worth knowing about, because a visit planned from an older account will go wrong. Gone are Exploring Space (1986 to 2025), Atmosphere (2010 to 2022), The Secret Life of the Home (closed June 2024), Challenge of Materials, Launchpad, Shipping and Agriculture. And Making the Modern World began closing in part from 30 June 2026 while its objects are moved: it becomes Ages of Invention, opening in 2028, funded by the Serum Institute of India in what the museum calls its largest international donation. A further new gallery, Tomorrow, opens in early 2027.

One caution on the museum's own information: its highlights page is dated 2017 and still places objects in galleries that have since closed.

The Wellcome Wing

The wing on the west side is MacCormac Jamieson Prichard's, cost £50 million and opened in 2000. It still does what it was built for — contemporary science and a large-format cinema, the IMAX being inside it — but almost nothing of its original contents survives. The galleries it opened with have been replaced in turn, and the floors now carry Power Up, Who Am I?, Pattern Pod, Engineers and Energy Revolution. The IMAX reopened in December 2020 after ten months' closure, with laser projection alongside the capacity to show 70mm film.

Sponsorship, and where that stands

The museum's corporate sponsorship has been contested for several years and the position has moved, so a dated account is the only useful one.

In November 2020 the director set out the museum's position publicly: that ending relationships with oil and gas companies would be unwise and that the right approach was to engage, debate and challenge. At that point Shell sponsored the Atmosphere gallery, Equinor sponsored Wonderlab and BP funded the group's teaching academy, and partners were to be assessed against the Transition Pathway Initiative's measure of alignment with the Paris agreement.

In July 2021 a freedom of information request revealed that the Shell contract contained a clause barring the museum and its trustees from any statement that could be seen as discrediting or damaging the sponsor's reputation during the term, signed after the content of the sponsored exhibition was complete. The museum's position was that this was a standard reciprocal clause present in most of its agreements and that claims curators had been inhibited were unsubstantiated. In October and November 2021, after Adani Green Energy was announced as funder of a new gallery, a climate scientist and former director of the museum resigned from its advisory board and two trustees resigned from the board; more than forty academics and later more than four hundred teachers pledged boycotts.

Since then: the Shell arrangement ended with its gallery in 2022; the Equinor partnership was ended in June 2024; and the BP relationship ended on 31 August 2026 after roughly twenty-five years. The museum said simply that the BP partnership had drawn to a close, gave no reason for not renewing, and would not discuss terms. Worth noting for balance: at the point it ended, BP met the museum's own published criteria, and campaigners expected its rating to fall at the next assessment rather than pointing to a failure already recorded.

The position now is the reverse of what most people assume. The Adani Green Energy arrangement is still running, and is the only fossil-fuel-linked sponsorship the museum holds; its term has not been made public. Protests continued through September 2026. Separately, the sector's own code of ethics was revised in October 2025 to advise museums to move away from sponsorship linked to environmental harm, a change this museum and three other nationals had argued against before it was ratified.

The group, and the other five sites

The Science Museum is the largest of six sites: the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, the National Railway Museum at York, Locomotion at Shildon, the National Science and Media Museum at Bradford, and a science and innovation park at Wroughton in Wiltshire, which holds the stored collections.

Two of them have been through long closures that older accounts will have wrong. Manchester's Power Hall, a listed building, closed in 2019 for roof and timber repairs and reopened on 17 October 2025 — about six years — restoring more than two thousand five hundred square metres of public space. Its Air and Space Hall closed permanently, announced in 2021, and the demonstration train rides that ran until 2018 will not resume. At York, Station Hall closed in 2023 for a ten-and-a-half-million-pound refurbishment and reopened in September 2025; a new Central Hall by Feilden Fowles began construction in September 2026 with no opening date published, and a temporary entrance opened through the South Yard in October 2026. Locomotion's New Hall opened in May 2024.

Getting in

General admission is free and a timed ticket is not required: the museum recommends booking, particularly at busy times, but walk-up entry is available every day. The ambiguity is the museum's own — its visitor page leads with an instruction to book free admission tickets, which reads as mandatory until the frequently-asked questions say otherwise. Timed tickets are needed for exhibitions, including the current one, which runs from 23 October 2026 to 25 April 2027.

On 28 September 2026 the Culture Secretary ruled out charging overseas visitors for entry to the fifteen national museums sponsored by the culture department, this group among them. Free admission in England's nationals dates from 1 December 2001.

It opens daily from ten in the morning to six, with last entry at a quarter past five, and closes from 24 to 26 December. Individual galleries keep their own shorter hours and close early more often than the museum as a whole, so anything planned around one specific gallery is worth checking on the day.

The galleries themselves are described as fully wheelchair accessible, with wheelchairs available to borrow, accessible lavatories on every floor, tactile maps and large-print gallery books, and twelve blue badge bays on Exhibition Road within about fifty metres of the entrance. But South Kensington station is not step-free — the nearest fully step-free station is Earls Court — and Exhibition Road is a kerb-free shared surface, which suits some visitors and not others.

The numbers, and the direction they are going

The Association of Leading Visitor Attractions recorded 2,640,417 visits in calendar 2025, ranking the museum tenth in the United Kingdom. The honest framing of that is not recovery. The same count gave it 3,301,975 visits and seventh place in 2019, 2,956,886 and eighth in 2023, and 2,827,242 and tenth in 2024 — so it is down by about a fifth on pre-pandemic levels and has slipped three places. The group as a whole reported just over four million visits in 2024–25, about eleven per cent below its own target.

For comparison from the same count, the Natural History Museum a few hundred metres away took first place in 2025 with 7,116,929 visits, a record for any museum or gallery in the country.