British Natural History Museum
The Natural History Museum in South Kensington, London, has an ornate
terracotta facade typical of high Victorian architecture.
The Natural History Museum, one of three large museums located on Exhibition Road, Kensington, London, England (the others are the Science
Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum),
is home to life and earth science collections comprising some 70 million specimens or items. There are five main collections:
Botany, Entomology, Mineralogy, Palaeontology and
Zoology.
The museum is renowned for its Central Hall and its exhibition of dinosaur
skeletons.
The foundation of the collection was a bequest by English doctor Sir Hans
Sloane (1660-1753). Sloane's collection, which
included dried plants, and animal and human skeletons, was initially housed in Montagu House in Bloomsbury in 1756, and was
considered part of the British Museum. In the late 1850s, Professor Richard Owen,
Superintendent of the natural history departments of the British Museum, became convinced that the Natural History Museum needed
a bigger building.
Land in South Kensington was purchased, and in 1864 a competition was held to design the
new museum. The winning entry was submitted by Captain Francis Fowke who died shortly afterwards. The scheme was taken over by Alfred Waterhouse who substantially revised the agreed plans, and
designed the facades in his own idiosyncratic Romanesquestyle. Work began in
1873 and was completed in 1880. The new museum opened
in 1881, although the move from the old museum was not fully completed until 1883.
Inside the terracotta decoration vies for attention with the reassembled
fossil
dinosaurs.
Both the interiors and exteriors make extensive use of terracotta bricks to
resist the sooty climate of Victorian London. The terracotta for the
interior and exterior was made by the famous Gibbs And Canning Limited of Tamworth. The bricks include many images of plants,
animals and fossils. The central axis of the museum is aligned with the tower of Imperial College (formerly the Imperial Institute) and the Royal
Albert Hall and Albert Memorial further north. These all form
part of the complex known as Albertopolis.
Legally, it remained a department of the British Museum, and its formal name was the British Museum (Natural History),
often abbreviated in the scientific literature as
B.M.(N.H.). In 1963, the Natural History Museum finally became an independent museum
with its own Board of Trustees, and in 1986 absorbed the adjacent Geological Museum of the
British
Geological Survey. However it was not until the Museums and Galleries Act of 1992 that the Museum's formal title was finally
changed from B.M.(N.H.) to The Natural History Museum
The museum also has cutting edge modern designed galleries, such as the Earth Galleries.
In the 1990s the Geological Museum's mineralogy displays, described as "just a
collection of rocks in cabinets", were completely rebuilt and relaunched in 1998 as a
multimedia exhibition entitled The Earth Galleries, while the other departments in the Waterhouse building were retitled
The Life Galleries. The Natural History Museum's own Mineralogy displays remain unchanged as an example of the nineteenth
century display techniques of the Waterhouse building.
The closest London Underground station is South Kensington.
View of the Natural History Museum from the south east
External link
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