Nature and Us: the NHM gallery closed since 1943 reopens today
Even regulars at the Natural History Museum have never stood in this room. From today, Wednesday 16 September, a gallery on the second floor of Alfred Waterhouse's building, closed to the public since 1943, reopens with a new display, Nature and Us. It is the latest step in the museum's NHM150 transformation, and it is one of the most intriguing things to happen in South Kensington this autumn.
A room with a past
The gallery sits just above the main entrance and, in size and position, mirrors the minerals gallery on the same floor. It first displayed skeletons, then mammals. After the museum's original herbarium was damaged during the Second World War, the room was turned over to the botanical collections and closed to visitors. Its original wooden herbarium cabinets are still in place, and they are part of the attraction: this is a working scientific space being shown to the public, not a blank white box.
Fifty objects about us
Nature and Us turns the usual museum question around. Instead of asking what we have learned about nature, it asks how nature has shaped us, through 50 objects both natural and made by people. Highlights include:
- a miniature model of one of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs;
- the Victorian skeleton of a monk seal called Jenny, known as the talking fish, which shows how wild animals were once exploited as entertainment;
- a 400,000-year-old handaxe that changed our understanding of when humans first existed;
- a 1980s Star Wars toy encrusted with bryozoans, an everyday object given new meaning by nature and time;
- a replica jaw, which you can touch, from one of Britain's earliest known domesticated dogs, dating to around 14,300 years ago.
The full object list and visual guide are on the museum's Nature and Us page.
Help write the next chapter
The display is deliberately experimental. It runs until March 2028, and visitors are invited to give feedback that will help decide which stories appear in a permanent gallery due to open in the same space in 2029. As ianVisits explains, it is part of a £550 million programme that will open a new or revitalised gallery every year until the museum's 150th anniversary in 2031, increasing public space by around 16 per cent. Last year's opening, Fixing Our Broken Planet, has already welcomed three million visitors, and a new gallery designed especially for young children, with hands-on interactives, is due in 2027. To make room on the South Kensington site, around a third of the archive collection is moving to a new storage and research centre near Reading.
Visiting
The museum is open daily from 10am to 5.50pm on Cromwell Road, a short walk from South Kensington station and an easy stroll from Knightsbridge. General admission to the museum's permanent galleries is free. Head up to the second floor and look for the room above the main entrance, and leave time to fill in the feedback: this is one exhibition where your opinion genuinely shapes what comes next.
