Natural History Museum

About Natural History Museum

Museum in London, England, UK

The Natural History Museum in London is one of the world's most famous museums and a favourite with families, located in South Kensington as one of the three great museums on Exhibition Road together with the Science Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, although its main frontage is on Cromwell Road. It opened in 1881 in Alfred Waterhouse's Romanesque building of terracotta decorated with carved plants and animals, earning the nickname "cathedral of nature"; it was part of the British Museum until legally separated in 1963, kept the name British Museum (Natural History) until 1992, and later absorbed the neighbouring Geological Museum as its Earth Galleries. The museum holds some 80 million life and earth science specimens in five main collections, botany, entomology, mineralogy, palaeontology and zoology, and is a world centre of research in taxonomy, identification and conservation; many of its collections have great historical as well as scientific value, such as the specimens collected by Charles Darwin. It is particularly famous for its dinosaur skeletons, including the animatronic Tyrannosaurus rex in the dinosaur gallery, for the huge blue whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling of the vaulted central hall since 2017, when it replaced the Diplodocus cast that once dominated it, the life-size blue whale model in the mammals gallery, the modern Darwin Centre with free tours of specimens not on public display, and the Earth Galleries with their earthquake simulation. Wikivoyage calls it probably the most popular of all the museums here and a must-see for many visitors to London, and in winter an ice rink is set up in front of its facade.

Where:

London, United Kingdom