Natural History Museum unveils £550m redevelopment plan

Hot on the heels of the British Museum’s plans for a major renovation, the Natural History Museum has unveiled its own £550 million project.

The museum’s director, Dr. Doug Gurr, says they plan to renovate four of the main galleries and reopen two galleries that are currently used for storage. One of the galleries, the Origins Gallery, has not been seen by the public since 2004. The gallery was closed when it was needed to house the museum’s vast insect collection when the Darwin Centre was built. The move from the Darwin Centre was the Natural History Museum’s largest move since it left the British Museum in 1882.

A former gallery now used for storage (c) Trustees of the Natural History Museum

The herbarium, closed since the 1940s, would also be reopened as a new public reading room.

To make room at the South Kensington museum site, they plan to move around a third of the museum’s archive collection to a new storage and research centre near Reading. Construction of the £201m ​​facility is set to begin early next year, with completion of the building expected in 2027 and the archive relocation in 2031.

The redevelopment will increase the museum’s public space by approximately 16 percent, allowing the museum to welcome an additional million visitors annually.

In addition to renovating the galleries and creating more space, they also want to improve the flow of visitors around the museum, which has changed rather haphazardly over the past 140 years and can be confusing.

Of the £550 million cost of the project, £400 million has also been pledged, largely by the government, leaving the museum to raise the remaining £150 million. The aim is to complete the project in 2031 – in time for the museum’s 150th anniversary.

The cost of the new London Museum at Smithfield is approaching half a billion pounds, and the British Museum project is set to cost as much and possibly more than £1 billion. As a result, three of London’s major museums are planning expansion and refurbishment work worth up to £2 billion over the next decade.

That’s in addition to the expansion of the V&A Museum in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.