BRITISH MUSEUM

Description

Essentials about the British Museum in brief

The British Museum is perhaps the most famous museum in the world and therefore an absolute must-see on a trip to London, even for those who don’t like museums. If you want to see all the departments of the British Museum, you should plan several days of visits, given that with about eight million exhibits it is definitely one of the largest museums in the world. The exhibits, which come from all countries of the world, document the cultural history from its early days until today.

The history and the building of the British Museum

The British Museum was founded in 1753, essentially based on the collections of the physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane. In 1759, the museum first opened to the public, then already on the site where it still stands today. The British Museum owes the gigantic expansion of its collections over the next 250 years largely to British colonial rule over much of the world.

The expansion of the collections led to the splitting off of individual sections in the 19th and 20th centuries, including the Natural History Museum and the British Library. In addition, the steadily growing number of exhibits and visitors made a larger building complex necessary. This complex, built in the neoclassical style, was finally completed in 1848 and remains the home of the museum to this day. The biggest architectural innovation in recent years has been the roofing of the courtyard with over 1,600 glass panels. With over 7,000 square meters of space, the British Museum courtyard is the largest covered public space in Europe.

The collections of the British Museum

The museum’s collections cover a period of two million years and are divided into around 90 individual collections. However, the majority of the eight million exhibits are not in the exhibition rooms, but are stored in magazines under the museum. To see everything, one would have to spend days, if not weeks, in the British Museum.

Many visitors therefore limit their visit to individual departments or look only at the highlights of the collections. These include the world-famous Rosetta Stone (which was instrumental in deciphering Egyptian hyroglyphs), the beautiful Elgin Marbles (marble friezes and marble statues from the Parthenon of the Athenian Acropolis) and the collection of Egyptian mummies.

Bookworms are recommended to visit the museum’s library with its approximately 350,000 volumes. With its grandiose dome, the reading room is one of the most beautiful in the world, and inquisitive minds can browse through some 25,000 reference works on a wide range of subjects.