Perhaps the finest Museum in the World, the British Museum has over 6 million visitors each year. It does not charge and admission fee and is open daily.
The Great Buildings website (
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"Until recently, the neoclassical British Museum in London was relatively unknown among the monuments of Europe. However, the opening of its Foster and Partners-designed Queen Elizabeth II Great Court has awakened a sleeping giant. This refurbishment can best be described as a fusion of conservation and innovation, merging old with new, to finally open up the museum to a new and admiring public.
"In 1823, architect Robert Smirke was commissioned to design a building in London to house the King's Library and to provide a proper home for the museum's collections. It took some 24 years to build.
"The original museum had four principal wings arranged around an open, two-acre (0.8-hectare), quadrangle-shaped courtyard. No sooner had the British Museum been completed in 1857 than a growing demand for storage space dictated that a new copper-domed reading room be built in the middle of the courtyard.
"The great Round Reading Room became a popular haven, used by such luminaries as Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Oscar Wilde, Leon Trotsky, Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, and Virginia Woolf."'
Wikipedia further (
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"The British Museum, in London, is widely considered to be one of the world's greatest museums of human history and culture. Its permanent collection, numbering some eight million works, is amongst the finest, most comprehensive, and largest in existence and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present.
The British Museum was established in 1753, largely based on the collections of the physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane. The museum first opened to the public on 15 January 1759 in Montagu House in Bloomsbury, on the site of the current museum building. Its expansion over the following two and a half centuries was largely a result of an expanding British colonial footprint and has resulted in the creation of several branch institutions, the first being the British Museum (Natural History) in South Kensington in 1887. Some objects in the collection, most notably the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon, are the objects of intense controversy and of calls for restitution to their countries of origin.
Until 1997, when the British Library (previously centred on the Round Reading Room) moved to a new site, the British Museum was unique in that it housed both a national museum of antiquities and a national library in the same building. The museum is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and as with all other national museums in the United Kingdom it charges no admission fee. Since 2002 the director of the museum has been Neil MacGregor."