The British Museum is a public national museum dedicated to human history, art, and culture in London, England’s and the United Kingdom’s capital. Founded in 1753 and inaugurated in 1759, it became the world’s first public national museum!

The British Museum is considered one of the best museums in London and one of the best museums in Europe. With a permanent collection of 8 million works, the largest in the world, it’s one of the most visited attractions in London!

So, do you want to know more about the British Museum: Best Tips For Visiting This Year? Keep reading!

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Brief History of the British Museum

As I mentioned in the introduction, the British Museum was established on June 7th, 1753, by an Act of Parliament that received the royal assent of King George II of Great Britain. Its permanent collection had belonged to Sir Hans Sloane, an Anglo-Irish physician, naturalist, and collector.

During its more than 200 years of history, the British Museum’s collection has grown to about eight million objects, covering two million years of human history. These objects are housed in the Montague House, a late 17th-century mansion that has since been rebuilt as a grand neoclassical building.

How to Get to the British Museum

The British Museum is situated on Great Russell Street, a street with several notable residents, including the poets and writers William Henry Davies and Percy Bysshe Shelley, the architects Thomas Henry Wyatt and John Nash, and the artist and illustrator Randolph Caldecott.

From here, you’re close to other points of interest, such as the Grant Museum of Zoology (600 meters), the Foundling Museum (800 meters), Sir John Soane’s Museum (800 meters), Covent Garden (800 meters), Chinatown (1000 meters), and Leicester Square (1100 meters).

Due to its excellent location in the Bloomsbury district, the British Museum is served by several types of public transport: metro (Central and Northern lines, Tottenham Court Road station; Central and Piccadilly lines, Holborn station; Piccadilly line, Russell Square station; Northern line, Goodge Street station) and bus (lines 1, 8, 19, 25, 38, 55, 98, 242, New Oxford Street stop; lines 14, 24, 29, 73, 134, 390, Tottenham Court Road – Northbound and Gower Street – Southbound stops; lines 59, 68, X68, 91, 168, 188, Southampton Row stop).

Opening Hours & Ticket Prices

The British Museum is open every day of the year except December 24th-26th, from 10 am to 5 pm (8:30 pm on Fridays). The last entry is at 4:45 pm (8:15 pm on Fridays), and the galleries begin to clear 10 minutes before closing.

The tickets to the permanent collection are free. Nevertheless, it’s recommended to book them in advance to receive priority entry during busy periods, which you can do on the British Museum’s official website!

What to See at the British Museum

The Rosetta Stone (Room 4)

The Rosetta Stone is a granodiorite stela inscribed with a priestly decree issued in 196 BC. Written in three different languages – hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Ancient Greek – it’s a fragment of a larger stone slab that became the key to deciphering the Egyptian scripts.

The Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799 by Napoleon’s soldiers in Rashid (Rosetta), a port city in northern Egypt. When the French were defeated, the relic was surrendered to the British as part of the Capitulation of Alexandria in 1801. The Rosetta Stone entered the British Museum the following year.

Bust of Ramesses the Great (Room 4)

The Bust of Ramesses the Great, also known as Younger Memnon, is the upper part of a colossal seated statue of the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II, from the Nineteenth Dynasty. One of a pair flanking the entrance of the king’s mortuary temple (the Ramesseum) in Thebes, it’s made of pink and grey granite.

Weighing 7.5 tonnes, the Bust of Ramesses the Great depicts Pharaoh Ramesses II wearing the Nemes striped headcloth with a Uraeus (the Egyptian cobra) ornament. Interestingly, the remainder of the statue can still be found at the original temple in Egypt, along with the head of the other twin statue!

Human-Headed Winged Bull & Lion (Room 8)

The Human-Headed Winged Bull & Lion are two carved gypsum sculptures of protective spirits that used to guard the entrance into what may have been King Ashurnasirpal II’s private apartments. Their respective twin statues are on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, USA.

King Ashurnasirpal II was the third king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, who built his Northwest Palace at Kalḫu (Nimrud) in modern-day Iraq. As for the hybrid gateway guardians, they were called Lamassu and were depicted as having a human head, a bull or lion body, and bird wings.

Crouching Venus (Room 23)

Crouching Venus is a marble sculpture dating from the second century AD, believed to be the Roman copy of a much earlier Greek work of the goddess Aphrodite – known as Venus to the Romans. The original Greek marble or bronze, now lost, was perhaps created between 200 and 100 BC.

Also referred to as Lely Venus, this masterpiece makes the viewer become a voyeur, surprising the goddess of love as she bathes. Part of the Royal Collection of the British Royal Family, Crouching Venus has been on long-term loan to the British Museum since 1963, according to the Royal Collection Trust.

The Nereid Monument (Room 17)

The Nereid Monument is a sculptured tomb from Xanthos in Lycia, southwest Turkey. Probably built for the Xanthian ruler Arbinas, it’s influenced by the Ionic temples of the Acropolis of Athens and was the main inspiration for the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

The Nereid Monument takes its name from the Nereids, sea nymphs in Greek mythology who helped sailors during storms. Its ruins were discovered by British archaeologist and explorer Charles Fellow in the early 1840s, who then shipped them to the British Museum for reconstruction.

Parthenon Sculptures (Room 18)

The Parthenon Sculptures, otherwise known as Parthenon Marbles or Elgin Marbles, are a collection of Ancient Greek marble sculptures that used to adorn the Parthenon and other buildings in the Acropolis of Athens – such as the Erechtheion, the Temple of Athena Nike, and the Propylaia.

Designed in the 5th century BC by the artist Pheidias, the Parthenon Sculptures were removed from Ottoman Greece and shipped to Britain from 1801 to 1812 by agents of Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin. Whether or not these marbles were obtained legally or ethically remains a dispute to this day.

Caryatid (Room 19)

The Caryatid is one of six female figures that used to support the architrave on the south porch of the Erechtheion, at the Acropolis of Athens. Made of Pentelic marble, this is one of the original sculptures, with the other five being exposed in the Acropolis Museum.

Although looking similar in appearance, the six Caryatids show some slight differences when it comes to their faces, hairstyles, garments, and even stances: the three on the left stand on their right foot (like the one in the British Museum), while the three on the right stand on their left foot!

Mausoleum of Halikarnassos (Room 21)

The Mausoleum of Halikarnassos was a tomb built between 353 and 351 BC in Halicarnassus (near modern-day Bodrum, Turkey) for Mausolus and his sister-wife Artemisia II of Caria. Elected one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, it’s the reason why we call above-ground tombs ‘mausoleums’!

As I mentioned previously in this guide, the Mausoleum of Halikarnassos took inspiration from the Nereid Monument for its design, even though it was built on a much larger scale. Measuring between 40-45 meters in height, it was decorated with sculptural marble reliefs on its four sides.

Sophilos Vase (Room 13)

The Sophilos Vase is a black-figured ‘dinos’ – a drinking cup used for mixing water and wine in Ancient Greece – and stand from around 580 BC. Its creator was Sophilos, an Attic potter and vase painter who specialized in the black-figure style and signed his works with the words ‘Sophilos made me’.

The Sophilos Vase depicts scenes from the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, a popular theme in ancient art and poetry. Peleus and Thetis were the parents of the hero Achilles. According to Greek mythology, all the gods and goddesses of Olympus attended their wedding.

The Portland Vase (Room 70)

The Portland Vase is a Roman cameo glass, probably made between 15 BC and 25 AD. This technique of glass art is achieved by producing two layers of glass, where an outer layer (usually white) is carved on a dark-colored background (usually blue) to create decorative figures and motifs.

The Portland Vase was named after the Dukes of Portland, who owned the relic from 1785 to 1945. This relic has been exposed in the British Museum since 1810 and is worldwide recognized as the best-known piece of Roman cameo glass.

The Royal Gold Cup (Room 40)

The Royal Gold Cup (or Saint Agnes Cup) is a gold and enamel cup made for the French Royal Family at the end of the 14th century. Having arrived at the British Museum in 1892, it’s considered one of the best surviving examples of late medieval French plate.

The Royal Gold Cup features scenes from the legends of Agnes of Rome, a virgin who lost her life at the age of 12 ou 13. Saint Agnes was one of the many Christians who were persecuted and martyred during the reign of the Roman emperor Diocletian (that is, from 284 to 304 AD).

The Lewis Chessmen (Room 40)

The Lewis Chessmen are a group of 12th-century chess pieces carved from walrus ivory, that have been described as the most famous chess set in the world. Interestingly, it seems that the colors used in the Middle Ages were red and ivory, instead of the modern-day black and white combination.

When they were discovered in 1831, on the Scottish Isle of Lewis, the hoard consisted of 93 pieces and included 78 chessmen, 14 large gaming counters, and one belt buckle. Nowadays, 82 pieces are owned by the British Museum and the remaining 11 are at the National Museum of Scotland, in Edinburgh.

Mummy of Artemidorus (Room 62)

The Mummy of Artemidorus is the mummy of a Greek young man called Artemidorus, who was buried in a cartonnage body case in the early 2nd century AD, in Roman Egypt. This is one of the around 140 mummies and coffins showcased in the British Museum, the largest collection outside Cairo, Egypt!

The lime wood portrait panel covering his face and a short Greek inscription that reads ‘Farewell, Artemidorus.’ easily identify the body. The Mummy of Artemidorus was enclosed in a red-painted stucco casing with a falcon collar and some Egyptian traditional funerary scenes in applied gold leaf.

Hoa Hakananai’a (Room 24)

Hoa Hakananai’a is a moai, a monolithic human figure carved by the Rapa Nui people, the indigenous Polynesian peoples of Easter Island. Carved from hard basalt, this statue was stolen from the stone village and ceremonial center of Orongo in 1868 by the crew of a British ship.

Dating from around 1000-1200 AD, the Hoa Hakananai’a is one of nearly 1,000 statues for which Easter Island is famous. Most moai have carvings on the back associated with the island’s birdman cult and were positioned on platforms (known as ahu) facing away from the ocean.

Haida House Pole (Great Court)

The Haida House Pole (or Kayung Totem Pole) is a 15-meter totem pole carved of red cedar wood, that was originally set at the front of a clan house in the village of Kayang in British Columbia, Canada. Sadly, the village was deserted due to epidemics introduced by the Europeans in the 19th century.

Made approximately in 1850, the Haida House Pole features crests representing mythical events related to the clan’s ancestors. Around 1900, Chief Wiah sold the pole to the British doctor and naturalist Charles Frederick Newcombe, who then sold it to the British Museum in 1903.

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