British Museum

Under the glass roof of the Great Court, which Norman Foster stretched over the old courtyard, paths lead off to every corner of the world. Besides the Rosetta Stone and the Parthenon sculptures, the biggest draws are the Egyptian mummies, the Anglo-Saxon treasure of Sutton Hoo and the Lewis Chessmen. The museum is too big for one visit, so it’s best to choose two or three departments. The mummy rooms upstairs are busiest in the morning and quieten down later.

Background

The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million artefacts is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present. Established in 1753, the British Museum was the world's first public national museum. In 2025, the museum received 6,440,120 visitors and was the second most visited attraction in the United Kingdom. At its beginning, the museum was largely based on the collections of the Anglo-Irish physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane. It opened to the public in 1759, in Montagu House, on the site of the current building. The museum's expansion over the following 250 years was largely a result of British colonisation and resulted in the creation of several branch institutions, or independent spin-offs, the first being the Natural History Museum in 1881.

From Wikipedia: “British Museum”, licence CC BY-SA 4.0