Museum

British Museum

📍 Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3DG🏗 1753-01-01🖊 Robert Smirke🏛 Grade I listed building

The British Museum begins with a person: Sir Hans Sloane, the Anglo-Irish physician and scientist whose collections formed the foundation of a “universal museum.” Sloane lived from 1660 to 1753, and the museum that carries the public idea of his collecting—human history, art and culture—was established in 1753 as the world’s first public national museum. It opened to the public in 1759 in Montagu House, on the site of the current building, and the museum later expanded over roughly the next 250 years. That growth was closely tied to Britain’s imperial era, producing major spin-offs, with the Natural History Museum created in 1881 as the first. In 1973, the British Library Act 1972 detached the library department, and the British Library continued to share the museum’s Reading Room and building until 1997. …
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