Last may, if I could recall, on the 25th- me and the rest of my family went on a special trip to England. Having to go there was one of the things I longed for since probably forever. To be able to see a place with so much history and culture to it was absolutely marvelous. England is considered a very old country and it has beautiful old buildings carrying so much stories. I couldn’t wait to visit Buckingham Palace, The Tate Modern Gallery, Tower of London, and many other places of England’s interests. While I was there, I visited almost every museum I could get myself to see. One of the places I traveled to was one of England’s popular legendary museum, The British Museum.
The British Museum is located in Great Russell Street, London WC1, and is still within Central London. I traveled there on the 29th May and got there by an underground tube, which was very easy to get used to. Public transports in England aren’t that hard to understand, I suppose. They carry out their information very well said. As I was saying, The British Museum was established in 1753 and first opened to the public on 15 January 1759 in Montagu House in Bloomsbury. Until 1997, when the British Library (previously centered on the Round Reading Room) moved to a new site, the British Museum was unique in that it housed both a national museum of antiquities and a national library in the same building. The museum is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and as with all other national museums in the United Kingdom it charges no admission fee. Since 2002, the director of the museum has been Neil MacGregor.
At that time, Sloane's collection consisted of around 71,000 objects of all kinds, including some 40,000 printed books, 7,000 manuscripts, extensive natural history specimens including 337 volumes of dried plants, prints and drawings including those by Albrecht Dürer and antiquities from Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Ancient Near and Far East and the Americas.
On 7 June 1753, King George II gave his formal assent to the Act of Parliament, which, established the British Museum. The Foundation Act added two other libraries to the Sloane collection. The Cottonian Library, assembled by Sir Robert Cotton, dated back to Elizabethan times and the Harleian Library, the collection of the Earls of Oxford. They were joined in 1757 by the Royal Library, assembled by various British monarchs. Together these four "foundation collections" included many of the most treasured books now in the British Library including the Lindisfarne Gospels and the sole surviving copy of Beowulf.
The British Museum was the first of a new kind of museum – national, belonging to neither church nor king, freely open to the public and aiming to collect everything. Sloane's collection, whilst including various miscellaneous objects, tended to reflect his scientific interests. The addition of the Cotton and Harley manuscripts introduced a literary and antiquarian element, and meant that the British Museum now became both national museum and library.
The body of trustees decided on a 17th-century mansion, Montagu House, as a location for the museum. The Trustees rejected Buckingham House, on the site now occupied by Buckingham Palace, on the causes of cost and the unsuitability of its location. With the acquisition of Montagu House the first exhibition galleries and reading room for scholars opened on 15 January 1759. In 1757, King George II gave the Old Royal Library, and with it the right to a copy of every book published in the country, thereby ensuring that the Museum's library would expand indefinitely.
The museum’s first notable addition towards its collection of antiquities was by Sir William Hamilton, British Ambassador to Naples, who sold his collection of Greek and Roman artifacts to the museum in 1784 together with a number of other antiquities and natural history specimens. A list of donations to the Museum, dated 31 January 1784 refers to the Hamilton bequest of a "Colossal Foot of an Apollo in Marble". It was one of two antiquities of Hamilton's collection drawn for him by Francesco Progenie, a pupil of Pietro Fabris, who also contributed a number of drawings of Mount Vesuvius sent by Hamilton to the Royal Society in London.
In the early 19th century the foundations for the extensive collection of sculpture began to be laid and Greek, Roman and Egyptian artifacts dominated the antiquities displays. After the defeat of the French Campaign in the Battle of the Nile, in 1801, the British Museum acquired more Egyptian sculpture and in 1802 King George III presented the Rosetta Stone; key to the deciphering of hieroglyphs.
In 1802, a Buildings Committee was set up to plan expansion of the museum, and further highlighted by the donation in 1822 of the King's Library (personal library of King George III) comprising 65,000 volumes, 19,000 pamphlets, maps, charts and topographical drawing. The neoclassical architect, Sir Robert Smirke, was asked to draw up plans for an eastern extension to the Museum and put forward plans for today's quadrangular building, much of which can be seen today. The dilapidated Old Montagu House was demolished and the work on the King's Library Gallery began in 1823.
The Museum became a construction site as Sir Robert Smirke's grand neo-classical building arose. The King's Library, on the ground floor of the East Wing, was handed over in 1827, and was described as one of the finest rooms in London although it was not fully open to the general public until 1857. However, special openings were arranged during The Great Exhibition of 1851. In spite of dirt and disruption the collections grew, outpacing the new building. In 1840 the Museum became involved in its first overseas excavations, Charles Fellows's expedition to Xanthos, in Asia Minor, whence came remains of the tombs of the rulers of ancient Lycia, among them the Nereid and Payava monuments.
The opening of the forecourt in 1852, marked the completion of Robert Smirke's 1823 plan. But adjustments were already made to cope with the unforeseen growth of the collections. Infill galleries were constructed for Assyrian sculptures and Sydney Smirke's Round Reading Room, with space for a million books, opened in 1857. Because of continued pressure on space, the decision was taken to move natural history to a new building in South Kensington, which would later become the British Museum of Natural History.
By the last years of the 19th century, The British Museum's collections had increased so much that the Museum building was no longer big enough for them. In 1895, the trustees purchased the 69 houses surrounding the Museum with the intention of demolishing them and building around the West, North and East sides of the Museum. The first stage was the construction of the northern wing which began in 1906. A temporary conservation laboratory was set up in May 1920 and became a permanent department in 1931. It is today the oldest in continuous existence. In 1923, the British Museum welcomed over one million visitors.
A New Public Face. In 1953, the Museum celebrated its 200. Many changes followed: the first full time in house designer and publications officer were appointed in 1964, A Friends organization was set up in 1968, an Education Service established in 1970 and publishing house in 1973. In 1963, a new Act of Parliament introduced administrative reforms. It became easier to lend objects, the constitution of the Board of Trustees changed ,and the Natural History Museum became fully independent. By 1959 the Coins and Medals office suite, completely destroyed during the war, was rebuilt and re-opened, attention turned towards the gallery work with new tastes in design leading to the remodelling of Robert Smirke's Classical and Near Eastern galleries. In 1962 the Duveen Gallery was finally restored and the Parthenon Sculptures were moved back into it, once again at the heart of the museum.
By the 1970s, the Museum was again expanding. More services for the public were introduced; visitor numbers soared, with the temporary exhibition "Treasures of Tutankhamun" in 1972, attracting 1,694,117 visitors, the most successful in British history.
The departure of the British Library to a new site at St Pancras, finally achieved in 1998, provided the space needed for the books. It also created the opportunity to redevelop the vacant space in Robert Smirke's 19th-century central quadrangle into the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court; the largest covered square in Europe which opened in 2000.
The ethnography collections, which had been housed in the short-lived Museum of Mankind at 6 Burlington Gardens from 1970, were returned to new purpose-built galleries.
The Museum again readjusted its collecting policies as interest in "modern" objects: prints, drawings, medals and the decorative arts reawakened. Ethnographical fieldwork was carried out in places as diverse as New Guinea, Madagascar, Romania, Guatemala and Indonesia and there were excavations in the Near East, Egypt, Sudan and the UK. The Weston Gallery of Roman Britain, opened in 1997, displayed a number of recently discovered hoards which demonstrated the richness of what had been considered an unimportant part of the Roman Empire. The Museum turned increasingly towards private funds for buildings, acquisitions and other purposes.
The Museum Today. Today, it is no longer houses collections of natural history, and the books and manuscripts it once held now form part of the independent British Library. The Museum nevertheless preserves its universality in its collections of artifacts, representing the cultures of the world, ancient and modern. The original 1753 collection has grown to over thirteen million objects at the British Museum, 70 million at the Natural History Museum and 150 million at the British Library.
The Round Reading Room, which was designed by the architect Sydney Smirke, opened in 1857. For almost 150 years researchers came here to consult the Museum's vast library. The Reading Room closed in 1997 when the national library (the British Library) moved to a new building at St. Pancras. Today, it's been transformed into the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Centre. This contains the Paul Hamlyn Library of books about the Museum's collections, which is open to all visitors. The Queen Elizabeth II Great Court is a covered square at the centre of the British Museum designed by the engineers Buro Happold and the architects Foster and Partners. The Great Court opened in December 2000 and is the largest covered square in Europe. The roof is a glass and steel construction, built by an Austrian steelwork company, with 1,656 uniquely shaped panes of glass. At the centre of the Great Court is the Reading Room vacated by the British Library, its functions now moved to St. Pancras. The Reading Room is open to any member of the public who wishes to read there.
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| Me + The Great Court. |
Today, the British Museum has grown to become one of the largest Museums in the world, covering an area of over 75,000 m2 of exhibition space, showcasing approximately 50,000 items from its collection.There are nearly one hundred galleries open to the public, representing 2 miles of exhibition space, although the less popular ones have restricted opening times. However, the lack of a large temporary exhibition space has led to the £100 million World Conservation and Exhibition Centre to provide one and to concentrate all the Museum's conservation facilities into one Conservation Centre. This project was announced in July 2007, with the architects Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners. It was granted planning permission in December 2009 and is expected for completion by 2013.
The British Museum is all in all a very huge building. The place has five levels and has more than 90 rooms with different exhibitions and artifacts to show. It has different departments also, such as Department of Africa, Asia, Americans, and so on.
As I got there, the one thing I couldn’t wait to see was real mummies. I got the chance to see Cleopatra’s mummy which felt both weird and scary. I didn’t see each and every rooms, it was almost impossible, obviously.
In 2009, the British Museum was ranked number one most visited museums in United Kingdom with the number of 5,569,981. And if it being ranked nationally wasn’t enough, this museum made it to number two most visited museums in the world in 2010, second to Louvre.
England has many other museums worth the visit, too. I can’t wait for my next visit there so I can visit just each and every one of them.
