Natural History Museum: A Cathedral of Terracotta

Why is it significant?

Step back far enough on Cromwell Road to take in the whole facade, banded in blue-grey and honey, with round Romanesque arches, twin towers and a skyline of pinnacles. Then come closer and study the decoration. Monkeys clamber up the columns.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Step back far enough on Cromwell Road to take in the whole facade, banded in blue-grey and honey, with round Romanesque arches, twin towers and a skyline of pinnacles. Then come closer and study the decoration. Monkeys clamber up the columns. Fish, lizards, birds and fossils crawl across every surface. The entire building is clad in terracotta, moulded with plants and animals.

The architect was Alfred Waterhouse, and the museum opened in 1881. The driving force behind it was Richard Owen, the anatomist who coined the word dinosaur in 1842 and who wanted the natural history collections of the British Museum moved into a proper cathedral of nature. Owen and Waterhouse agreed a rule you can still check with your own eyes: living species decorate the western half of the building, extinct ones the eastern half. Terracotta was chosen partly because London's sooty air could be washed off its hard surface.

There is a delicious irony inside. Owen was a fierce critic of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, yet it is Darwin whose marble statue now sits at the top of the great staircase, calmly surveying the crowds. Owen has a statue too... but history has given Darwin the better seat.

Under the vaulted roof of that central hall dives Hope, the skeleton of a blue whale more than twenty-five metres long. She stranded in Wexford Harbour in Ireland in 1891 and was bought by the museum soon afterwards. Since 2017 she has taken the place of Dippy, the much-loved plaster cast of a Diplodocus that greeted visitors for decades. Her name is deliberate: blue whales were hunted almost to extinction, and their slow recovery is one of conservation's rare good-news stories.

Behind these walls lie some eighty million specimens, from meteorites to beetles, including creatures collected by Darwin himself on the voyage of the Beagle. Most of them never go on show; scientists from all over the world come to study them. Now walk east along Cromwell Road and cross Exhibition Road. Ahead stretches a long palace of brick and stone, its central tower topped by a figure of Fame.