British Museum

The British Museum: How to Make the Most of It

The British Museum has 8 million objects and roughly 80,000 on display at any given time. Most visitors have three or four hours, which means you’ll see a fraction of what’s there. The question is which fraction.

The museum is free, which is one of the great things about it. Temporary exhibitions require a ticket and these are often very good — the programme has included major shows on Viking settlements, Stonehenge, Egypt’s last pharaohs, and ancient Greece. Worth checking what’s on before you go.

The Unmissable Rooms

Room 4, on the ground floor, holds the Rosetta Stone. You’ll recognise it instantly from the photographs. The stone is displayed at an angle in a climate-controlled case, and it’s surrounded by people taking photographs at most hours of the day. It’s smaller than most people expect. The explanatory panels are worth reading — the decipherment story, spanning 23 years and involving Champollion, Young, and others, is genuinely interesting.

Room 18 holds the Parthenon sculptures, taken from the Athenian Acropolis by Lord Elgin between 1801 and 1812. They occupy a large dedicated gallery, displayed well. The political argument about their return to Greece has been running for decades and is unlikely to be resolved quickly. Whatever your view on that, the sculptures themselves — the horsemen of the Panathenaic procession, the Lapith fighting the centaur, the goddess figures from the pediment — are extraordinary.

Room 41 has the Lewis Chessmen: 93 Norse gaming pieces carved from walrus ivory and found on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland in 1831. They date from the 12th century and are surprisingly small, and surprisingly expressive. The figures include bishops, warriors biting their shields in battle frenzy, and serene queens. Eleven of the pieces are in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh; the Museum of the Isles on Lewis also has one.

Room 37 holds the Sutton Hoo helmet, found in Suffolk in 1939 in a 7th-century Anglo-Saxon ship burial. It’s one of the most iconic objects in British archaeology. The reconstruction gives you the full effect; the original fragments are displayed separately.

The Great Court

Norman Foster’s glass roof over the central courtyard, completed in 2000, is architecturally the most impressive space in the building. The central Reading Room, a circular structure within the courtyard, no longer functions as a library (the British Library moved to King’s Cross in 1997) but is open to visitors.

Practical Notes

Arrive when the museum opens at 10am, particularly on weekends, to avoid the worst of the queues at the popular rooms. The Parthenon gallery and the Egyptian rooms are crowded by 11am. Fridays the museum is open until 20:30, which makes late-afternoon visits quieter.

The Great Court Restaurant is adequate and overpriced, as museum cafés usually are. The Court Café in the basement is cheaper and offers better value. For a proper meal, Bloomsbury and nearby Fitzrovia have good options within a 10-minute walk.

The museum is walking distance from Holborn, Russell Square, or Tottenham Court Road stations.