Founded with 38 paintings in 1824, free to enter ever since. The National Gallery after its bicentenary, its £85m new entrance and its first full rehang since 1991.
The real size of the collection, three paintings older accounts wrongly place here, the October 2025 jewel theft and the emptied Galerie d'Apollon, the pyramid and the vanished Tuileries palace, the decade-long rebuild, and the two-tier admission introduced in 2026.
The Great Court opened in 2000 in the courtyard the library had filled until 1997, and the question of where the Parthenon sculptures belong is still open.
SUE left the main hall in 2018 for a gallery inside Evolving Planet, and a 122-foot titanosaur cast called Maximo stands there instead. Also the Tsavo lions, Bushman the gorilla, and why 'most complete T. rex' is the claim that holds.
Renamed in May 2024 after a donation, and still the MSI locally. The building is the last of the 1893 fair left standing; the submarine moved indoors in 2005; and the founder who paid for it refused to have his name on it.
Founded in 1879 as a museum and a school. Renzo Piano's Modern Wing of 2009 added a third to its size and a second entrance from Millennium Park, and a complete Louis Sullivan trading room was rebuilt inside the building.
How admission really works at the Met, MoMA and the Whitney — including which free evening an overseas visitor can actually use — then the big collections, the medieval monastery reassembled above the Hudson, and the specialist museums worth the detour. With the Guggenheim ramp advice its architect intended and most visitors get backwards.
This is two buildings now. The Sydney Modern Project opened a second one on 3 December 2022, close to doubling the exhibition space, and the Yiribana Gallery of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art moved into its ground floor. The buildings were named in the Sydney language only in April 2024, and the gallery joined the State Heritage Register only in November 2024.
There is no replica called Discovery here and never has been, and the museum has two replicas rather than one — the second is Duyfken, of the Dutch ship that reached Australia in 1606. HMAS Vampire is a destroyer of 1959, not a wartime ship; the vessel that fought the Second World War is Krait. The tall ship alongside belongs to the Sydney Heritage Fleet, and none of the vessels has wheelchair access.
Australia's first museum marks two hundred years on 30 March 2027, with a programme already announced. General admission has been free to everyone, with no residency condition, since 28 November 2020, after the fifteen-month Project Discover rebuild. Surviving Australia was torn out and reopened in December 2025, and the Sydney funnel-web was found in 2025 to be three species rather than one.
