History

The Natural History Museum collections originated with Sir Hans Sloane, whose bequest to the nation in 1753 founded the British Museum. The natural history departments — botany, zoology, mineralogy, palaeontology — remained part of the British Museum until the pressure of expanding collections in the mid-19th century created the need for a dedicated building. The architect Francis Fowke drew initial plans before his death in 1865; Waterhouse, appointed in 1868, redesigned the building entirely, choosing a Romanesque Revival vocabulary that he believed suited the scientific content better than the Neoclassical style of the British Museum itself.

Waterhouse’s most consequential decision was to abandon conventional stone facing in favour of terracotta, then a new and unpopular industrial building material. He specified two tones: buff for panels depicting living species, blue-grey for extinct ones — a chromatic iconographic system that made the building’s entire skin a taxonomy of natural history. The carving programme, designed by Waterhouse in collaboration with the museum’s scientific staff, represents an extraordinary synthesis of artistic and scientific knowledge: the Dodo on the east wing, the ammonites in the window arches, the fish running along the sill courses are all rendered with taxonomic accuracy rather than decorative licence.

Richard Owen, the museum’s first superintendent and the man who coined the word “dinosaur,” shaped the building’s intellectual purpose: it was to be a place of popular instruction as much as scientific research. The Grand Hall was conceived as a public promenade where visitors could encounter the collection’s greatest objects. In 2017, the Diplodocus cast that had occupied the Grand Hall since 1905 was replaced by the blue whale skeleton Hope — a switch that simultaneously updated the museum’s messaging (from the age of dinosaurs to the health of current oceans) and preserved the tradition of a single spectacular specimen dominating the space.