British Museum

The museum began in the will of Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), an Anglo-Irish physician and naturalist from Ulster. Not wishing to see his collection broken up, he left it to George II for the nation on condition that Parliament pay his heirs £20,000, far less than its contemporary valuation. It ran to some 71,000 objects: 40,000 printed books, 7,000 manuscripts, prints by Albrecht Dürer, and antiquities from Egypt, Greece, Rome and the Americas.

George II gave royal assent to the founding act on 7 June 1753, which added to Sloane's material the Cottonian and Harleian libraries; the Old Royal Library followed in 1757. Between them the foundation collections held the Lindisfarne Gospels and the sole surviving manuscript of Beowulf. It was a new kind of institution: national, belonging to neither church nor king, freely open to the public, and aiming to collect everything.

The trustees bought Montagu House, a 17th-century mansion, for £20,000. Its first galleries and a reading room for scholars opened on 15 January 1759; in 1763 Daniel Solander, a former student of Linnaeus, reclassified the natural history collection on the Linnaean system. Antiquities came more slowly: the first of significance were Sir William Hamilton's Greek vases, bought in 1772 for £8,410. From 1778 objects brought back from James Cook's voyages drew visitors. By 1800 Montagu House was crowded and decrepit.

In 1802 George III presented the Rosetta Stone, key to the deciphering of hieroglyphs, and from 1818 purchases from Henry Salt, consul general in Egypt, began with the colossal bust of Ramesses II. About half the surviving Parthenon sculptures, removed from the Acropolis by the agents of Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, were acquired under an act of Parliament in 1816.

Work on Sir Robert Smirke's quadrangular building began with the King's Library Gallery in 1823, and Montagu House was demolished in 1842. Smirke's brother Sydney filled the wasted central courtyard with the cast-iron Round Reading Room, built at the librarian Anthony Panizzi's request and opened in 1857. Overseas excavation began at Xanthos in 1840, then at Nimrud and Nineveh, which eventually yielded Ashurbanipal's library of cuneiform tablets.

A gallery for the Parthenon sculptures, funded by Sir Joseph Duveen, was completed in 1938. The director John Forsdyke had judged that air raids would be far worse than those of the previous war; after the Munich crisis he ordered 3,300 no-nail boxes. Removal of selected items began on 24 August 1939, a day after the Home Secretary advised it, to basements, country houses, Aldwych tube station and the National Library of Wales. Before the war the Nazis had sent a researcher to work in the museum for several years, with the aim of compiling an anti-Semitic history of Anglo-Jewry.

On the night of 10–11 May 1941 incendiaries destroyed the courtyard book stack and 150,000 books, damage not fully repaired until the early 1960s. The Duveen Gallery, hit by a bomb in 1940, stood semi-derelict for 22 years and reopened in 1962.

The British Library Act 1972 separated the manuscripts and printed books from the museum, though the Round Reading Room stayed open to readers until 1997 and the library's move to St Pancras was completed in 1998. The emptied courtyard became Foster and Partners' Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, opened in December 2000.

The museum is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, managed by 25 trustees under the British Museum Act 1963, and charges no admission except for loan exhibitions; the building was listed Grade I in October 1951. Several of its best-known holdings are claimed elsewhere — the Parthenon sculptures by Greece, the Benin Bronzes by Nigeria, the Rosetta Stone by Egypt — and it has argued that the 1963 Act bars its trustees from disposing of anything that has entered the collection.

In 2005 a High Court judge ruled that it would be illegal for the museum to return four old master drawings stolen by the Gestapo in 1939 from Arthur Feldmann, an art collector murdered in the Holocaust, despite its stated willingness to do so; the law was changed in 2009, and Feldmann's heirs accepted compensation. In August 2023 a staff member was dismissed after gold, jewellery and gems were found to have been taken over a long period, and the director Hartwig Fischer resigned over the museum's inadequate response to warnings of theft. By May 2024, 626 items had been recovered.