Natural History Museum

The collection began with the Ulster doctor Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753), whose collections the British Government bought at well below their market value with money raised by a lottery; they were housed from 1756 in Montagu House, Bloomsbury, then the home of the British Museum. Most of that material had disappeared by the early nineteenth century. George Shaw, Keeper of Natural History from 1806 to 1813, sold specimens to the Royal College of Surgeons and held periodic cremations of material in the museum grounds; the Annual Report of 1833 states that of the 5,500 insects listed in the Sloane catalogue, none remained. The Treasury refused to entrust the departments with specimens collected at the government's expense. Many of these faults were corrected by the palaeontologist Richard Owen, appointed Superintendent of the natural history departments in 1856.

Owen saw that his departments needed more space than the British Museum site allowed. Land was bought in South Kensington and a competition held in 1864, drawing only thirty-three submissions. The winner, the civil engineer Captain Francis Fowke, died in December 1865; rather than hand the work to the second-place winner, Fowke's plans were expanded on instead. Alfred Waterhouse, hired in February 1866, revised them substantially and designed the façades in his own Romanesque style. Side wings were dropped for budgetary reasons, and the estimate fell from £495,000 to £330,000. Work ran from 1873 to 1880, the museum opened on 18 April 1881, and the move from the old museum was not fully completed until 1883.

Terracotta from the Tamworth firm of Gibbs and Canning was used inside and out to resist the sooty atmosphere of Victorian London. Its relief sculptures, modelled by M Dujardin, a French sculptor based in London, put living species in the west wing and extinct ones in the east, a separation made at Owen's request that has been seen as his rebuttal of Darwin's attempt to link present species with the past.

Even after the opening the museum remained legally a department of the British Museum, under the formal name British Museum (Natural History). A petition to the Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1866, signed by the heads of the Royal, Linnean and Zoological societies and by naturalists including Darwin, Wallace and Huxley, asked for independence from the British Museum board. The British Museum Act 1963 gave the museum its own board of trustees but kept the old name. A public re-brand in 1989 dropped that title from advertising, and the Museums and Galleries Act 1992 changed the formal title at last.

Dippy, a 105-foot replica of a Diplodocus carnegii skeleton, was a gift from the Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie after a discussion with King Edward VII, then a keen trustee of the British Museum. Carnegie paid £2,000 for the casting, the pieces reached London in 36 crates, and the cast was unveiled on 12 May 1905; Carnegie later paid for further copies for most major European capitals and for Central and South America.

The blue whale that replaced it had stranded at the mouth of Wexford Harbour in March 1891 after being injured by whalers, and its skeleton lay in storage for 42 years until the New Whale Hall was built in 1934. A life-sized model was pieced together inside that hall in view of the public and finished in 1938, at 92 feet then the largest such model in the world. Dippy was removed in early 2017 after 112 years on display, the whale skeleton nicknamed Hope was unveiled on 14 July 2017, and Dippy then toured British museums from 2018 until 2020, ending at Norwich Cathedral.

The Waterhouse building has been Grade I listed since April 1969. In 1985 the museum merged with the adjacent Geological Museum of the British Geological Survey, whose exhibitions had included the world's first computer-enhanced exhibition, Treasures of the Earth; those galleries were rebuilt and relaunched in 1996 as the Earth Galleries. Phase one of the Darwin Centre, holding the zoological spirit collections, opened in 2002, and phase two, designed by the Danish practice C. F. Møller Architects as an eight-storey cocoon for the entomology and botanical collections, opened to the public in September 2009. Construction of a new collections facility at Shinfield, Berkshire, began in 2025. The museum is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and admission has been free since May 2001 for permanent exhibitions and some events.