The British Museum in London is one of the world's greatest museums of human history and culture. Its collections, which number more than 13 million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its beginning to the present.[a]
| “ | The wonders of the museum brought here to Bloomsbury from all around the world's imagined corners are numberless. How can they be named? As well tally each leaf of a tree. They come here out of the living minds of generations of men and women now dead – Greek and Assyrian, Aztec and Inuit, Chinese and Indian – who have conceived and carved and hammered and tempered and cast these objects to represent the worlds around them, visible and invisible.[3] | ” |
The British Museum was established in 1753, largely based on the collections of the physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane. The museum first opened to the public on 15 January 1759 in Montagu House in Bloomsbury, on the site of the current museum building. Its expansion over the following two and a half centuries has resulted in the creation of several branch institutions, the first being the British Museum (Natural History) in South Kensington in 1887. Until 1997, when the current British Library building opened to the public, the British Museum was unique in that it housed both a national museum of antiquities and a national library in the same building. Since 2001 the director of the Museum has been Neil MacGregor.[4]
As with all other national museums and art galleries in Britain, the Museum charges no admission fee, although charges are levied for some temporary special exhibitions.[5]
