Despite these precautions, a collection of 250,000 historic books was destroyed during an air raid in May 1940. Large, heavy sculptures could not be safely transported to Wales so they were moved into the nearby Aldwych tube tunnel. In 1879 the Museum became one of the first public buildings in London to install electric lighting.ĭuring World War Two most of the museum collection was moved to a bomb-proof tunnel in Aberystwyth, Wales. Eventually, the collection became too large, and the British Library was formed to hold them. The same thing happened with the British Museum's collection of books and manuscripts. The new collection became the Natural History Museum. New premises in Kensington were built to hold the natural history specimens. The chamber is now encased in a striking glass-roofed Great Court designed by Sir Norman Foster.īy 1880 the British Museum collections had grown so large that the Bloomsbury site was not able to hold it all. The centrepiece of the new British Museum was the Reading Room, a huge domed chamber. Smirke's new museum took 29 years to finish and was completed in 1852. In 1823 the architect Sir Robert Smirke began building a new building in Greek Revival style to replace Montagu House as the museum's home. Mozart dedicated his first sacred composition, ‘ God is Our Refuge’ (K. One of the early visitors was the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who came in 1765. That other site was Buckingham House, then a private dwelling but today known as Buckingham Palace, the royal family's London residence. The London landscape would look quite different today if another proposed site had been chosen instead. It was the first national public museum in the world with a mandate covering all areas of human knowledge. The museum was housed in Montague House in Bloomsbury and opened to the public on 15 January 1759. In addition to Sloane's collection, the first museum included objects collected by Sir Robert Cotton and Robert Harley, the 1st Earl of Oxford. The museum collection consisted of antiquities, manuscripts, books, natural history specimens, and ethnographic artefacts. The Sloane bequest formed the basis of the British Museum, established by an Act of Parliament on 7 June 1753.
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