The architecture of the Waterhouse building with its huge facade and high spired towers is world famous. The rounded arches and the grand entrance inspired by the basalt columns of Fingal's Cave in western Scotland, make the Museum one of the most striking examples of Romanesque style.
By the mid 1800s the natural history collections at the British Museum were
stored in cramped, damp and inadequate conditions. Professor Richard Owen,
the celebrated anatomist and palaeontologist who gave us the word
'dinosaur', was superintendent of the collections. He successfully petitioned the
Gladstone Government for funds to create a new building to house the collections. The South Kensington site of the 1862 International Exhibition was chosen for the new museum.
The commission to design the building was finally awarded to the young architect Alfred Waterhouse. Following Owen's brief to have a building suitable 'for housing the works of the Creator' Waterhouse set about this monumental task. After several redesigns and seven years of construction beset with difficulties, the building was opened to an enthusiastic public in 1881.
Both inside and outside the building, Terracotta tiles provide elaborate decoration of the museum's architecture. Many feature relief carvings of plants and animals, representing biological diversity. Alfred Waterhouse loved terracotta with its irregular tints and sculptural qualities. The distinctive buff and cobalt blue terracotta is not only attractive but also highly practical as it was resistant to attack by the acid smogs of Victorian London.
The elaborate ornamentation and sculptures of plants and animals inside and
outside the building represent also biological diversity. Those on the western
wing are of living forms while those on the eastern side depict the fossilized
past.
One of the first buildings to use the Victorian innovation of structural cast iron and steel, the Waterhouse building marks the beginning of a whole new era in architectural design.
It was not until much later that the natural history collections were officially separated from the other collections of The British Museum. In 1963 the Natural History Museum was finally established by Act of Parliament as an independent museum with its own board of Trustees.
In 1986 The Natural History Museum incorporated the former Geological Museum which had been constructed on an adjacent site in 1935. To consolidate the merger a new gallery, Lasting Impressions, linking the two buildings was opened in 1988. Since then, visitors have been able to enjoy superb natural history collections under one roof: the Life Galleries, and Geological collections,and the Earth Galleries.
