London Guide
Bloomsbury
The British Museum
Telephone: 020/7323 8000
Website: www.britishmuseum.org
Opening time: Daily 10am–5.30pm, Thurs & Fri until 8.30pm
Price: Free
The British Museum is one of the great museums of the world. With seventy thousand exhibits ranged over two and a half miles of galleries, the museum boasts one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of antiquities, prints and drawings to be housed under one roof – more than thirteen million at the last count (a number increasing daily with the stream of new acquisitions, discoveries and bequests). Its assortment of Roman and Greek art is unparalleled, its Egyptian collection is the most significant outside Egypt and, in addition, there are fabulous treasures from Anglo-Saxon and Roman Britain, from China, Japan, India and Mesopotamia – not to mention an enormous collection of prints and drawings, only a fraction of which can be displayed at any one time.
The building itself, begun in 1823, is the grandest of London's Greek Revival edifices, dominated by the giant Ionian colonnade and portico that forms the main entrance. At the heart of the museum is the Great Court (daily 9am–6pm, Thurs– Sat until 11pm), with its remarkable, curving glass-and-steel roof, designed by Norman Foster. At the centre stands the copper-domed former Round Reading Room, built in the 1850s to house the British Library. It was here, reputedly at desk O7, beneath one of the largest domes in the world, that Karl Marx penned Das Kapital.
You'll never manage to see everything in one visit, so the best advice is to concentrate on one or two areas of interest, or else sign up with one of the museum's guided tours. Among the highlights are the Elgin Marbles, the Egyptian mummies, the Assyrian reliefs from Nineveh, the leathery half-corpse of the 2000-year-old Lindow Man, the twelfth-century Lewis chessmen and the African galleries.