British Museum

The British Museum stands on Great Russell Street in Bloomsbury, central London. It was founded by an Act of Parliament in 1753, largely based on the collection of the physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane, and opened to the public in 1759 as the first national public museum in the world.

The collection grew quickly through gifts, purchases and colonial expansion. The museum's natural history collections moved to South Kensington in the 1880s to form the Natural History Museum, and the library became the British Library in 1973. Some objects, including the Parthenon sculptures, are the subject of long-running requests for return.

The main building, with its Greek Revival facade of 44 Ionic columns, was designed by Sir Robert Smirke and built between 1823 and 1852. The Great Court, covered by a glass and steel roof designed by Foster and Partners with the engineers Buro Happold, opened in December 2000 around the former Reading Room. The permanent collection of about eight million objects covers two million years of human history. Highlights include the Rosetta Stone, the Parthenon sculptures, Assyrian sculpture, Egyptian mummies and the Sutton Hoo ship burial.

Entry to the permanent collection is free, and booking a free timed entry slot is recommended at busy times. Special exhibitions are paid. Bags are searched at the entrance. Tottenham Court Road, Holborn and Russell Square stations are all within a short walk.

The museum counted 6,440,120 visitors in 2025, the second highest of any attraction in the United Kingdom, so the Egyptian galleries and the Rosetta Stone in Room 4 are crowded from late morning. Arriving at opening time makes a real difference.

The Parthenon sculptures, often called the Elgin Marbles, were removed from the Acropolis in Athens by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, who was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1799 to 1803, and shipped to Britain. Greece has asked for their return for decades, and the Rosetta Stone is the subject of similar claims from Egypt. The museum displays both with panels explaining how they were acquired.

The Round Reading Room at the heart of the Great Court has its own story. Robert Smirke's original quadrangle was judged wasted space, and at the request of the librarian Antonio Panizzi his brother Sydney Smirke filled it with a circular cast-iron reading room, opened in 1857 with shelf space for a million books. The British Library Act 1972 separated the library from the museum in 1973, but the books stayed in the museum until 1997, when they left for the new British Library at St Pancras.