★★★★★ 5.0
Discover
The British Museum
The ceiling above you is made entirely of papier-mâché. Yes, you heard that right - this grand dome stretching 140 feet across, once the second-widest in the world after Rome's Pantheon, is essentially paper and glue suspended from cast iron struts. When Sydney Smirke designed this architectural marvel in 1857, he created what was essentially the world's most elegant book storage solution, housing 25 miles of shelves around its circular walls. Before this Greek Revival masterpiece rose on Great Russell Street, a 17th-century mansion called Montagu House stood here until its demolition in 1823. As you step through Robert Smirke's iconic columned entrance, you're following in the footsteps of Karl Marx, who spent years researching Das Kapital in the Reading Room, alongside Lenin, Bram Stoker, and Arthur Conan Doyle. During the Blitz, German bombs destroyed over 250,000 books in a single night, but this remarkable dome survived to tell its tales.
Did You Know?
- Founded in 1753 by an Act of Parliament, the British Museum is the world’s oldest national public museum and was the first institution of its kind to be freely open to the public—a revolutionary idea at the time, as most collections were private or church-owned.
- The museum’s permanent collection spans over 8 million objects, but only about 80,000 are on display at any one time; the rest are stored in a vast network of secure archives, some of which are rarely seen by the public—making the museum a treasure trove of hidden artifacts waiting to be discovered.
- The iconic Greek Revival building, designed by Sir Robert Smirke, features a grand colonnaded portico and a pediment with sculptures by Sir Richard Westmacott that symbolize the 'progress of civilisation'—a bold artistic statement reflecting Victorian Britain’s imperial confidence and the museum’s global aspirations.