Natural History Museum, London

The Natural History Museum is London's national museum of the natural world, on Cromwell Road in South Kensington, next to the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Science Museum. Entry to the permanent galleries is free, and it suits families, dinosaur fans and anyone curious about rocks, animals and the history of life.

Sloane's collection, Richard Owen and the 1881 building

The museum began as the natural history collections of the British Museum, built on the collection of the physician Sir Hans Sloane, and the scientist Richard Owen led the campaign for a separate building. It opened in South Kensington in 1881 and became fully independent of the British Museum in 1963. Alfred Waterhouse designed the building in a Romanesque style and covered it inside and out with terracotta panels moulded with plants and animals: living species on the west side, extinct ones on the east.

Hope the blue whale and 80 million specimens

The collections number around 80 million specimens, from meteorites and minerals to insects, plants and fossils, and the museum is a working research centre. Hintze Hall, the great central hall, has displayed the skeleton of a blue whale named Hope since 2017, replacing the cast of a Diplodocus called Dippy. The Dinosaurs gallery has a moving model of Tyrannosaurus rex. In the Earth Hall an escalator rises through a large metal globe into the Volcanoes and Earthquakes gallery. The Darwin Centre, the mineral and meteorite galleries and the Wildlife Garden round out a full day. Each autumn the museum opens its Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition.