London's Natural History Museum: Alfred Waterhouse's 'Cathedral to Nature' in Terracotta

Key facts

• The Natural History Museum in London was designed by architect Alfred Waterhouse.
• Victorian naturalist Richard Owen championed the creation of a dedicated natural history museum, envisioning it as a 'cathedral to nature.'
• The museum was built because Britain's expanding natural history collections had outgrown their quarters at the British Museum.
• Waterhouse combined Gothic Revival and 12th-century Romanesque styles, featuring rounded arches, relief panels, and cathedral-like towers.
• Terracotta was chosen for its resistance to Victorian London's climate and pollution, and its suitability for decorative work.
• The museum opened in 1881, when gas and electric lighting were limited and largely untrusted in galleries, making natural light important.
• Hintze Hall's ceiling has 162 hand-painted and gilded botanical panels depicting plants valued in Victorian Britain for economic, medicinal, and horticultural importance.
• An approximately 83-foot-long (25 m) blue whale skeleton named 'Hope' is suspended in Hintze Hall as a symbol of conservation.
• A marble statue of Charles Darwin overlooks Hintze Hall from the head of the central staircase.
• Terracotta reliefs and gargoyles depict extinct creatures like pterosaurs and palaeotherium, and living animals including lions and wolves.
• Waterhouse placed extinct species on the east wing and living species on the west wing.
• The Minerals Gallery preserves original oak display cases, maintaining a Victorian cabinet of curiosities atmosphere.
• The Darwin Centre's Cocoon houses around 20 million entomology and botany specimens.
• The museum holds specimens collected by Charles Darwin during his voyage aboard HMS Beagle.