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| Step into the 19C century... Photo by Nick Garrod |
This weekend, for the first time in over 15 years, I visited
the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. I used to spend a lot of time
there as a child, (when I had serious plans to become a zoologist), peering at
stuffed quaggas, hummingbirds and bison in glass cases. Although the lay-out of
this vast collection hasn’t changed very much in the intervening decades, it all
looked rather different viewed through a historian’s eyes.
The Natural History Museum was split off from the main
collections of the British Museum in the late nineteenth century. The first
architect assigned to the project, Captain Francis Fowke, promptly died, and
the successful Liverpool-born, Quaker-raised Alfred Waterhouse took over and
made the design his own. With its metal and glass roof, idiosyncratic neo-Romanesque
façade, terracotta cladding and sweeping staircases reminiscent of a vast
railway station, the Museum feels like a Victorian fantasia – built as a temple
where the complexity of creation could be venerated, and where the working man
could go (after work, by the aid of gas lamps) for self-improvement. The
buildings Victorian-ness is etched completely into its fabric: everywhere you
look, on every column or patch of ceiling, there are 19C frescos of ferns,
reliefs of dodos, fish or rams’ heads. Even empty of any collections, this
building would feel as if it were creeping and crawling with natural life, as
imagined over a century ago.
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| Stuffed slow loris in the museum Photo by Peter Taylor |
The Museum’s collections, however, are a strange mix of the
archaic and cutting edge. There is a Darwin Centre in a new wing which
showcases zoological research, and a modern dinosaur exhibit with a colossal
animated tyrannosaurus rex. Most of the building nonetheless still consists of
long galleries of glass cases, filled with intriguing but badly faded stuffed
mammals, birds and sea life, displays from another age.
In Reading, in Berkshire, there used to be a rather
dilapidated green space called Forbury Gardens in the middle of the town. Using a
National Lottery grant, the council transformed the park to look as it would
have done in its Victorian hey-day: using plants from 19C catalogues, and
flowerbed shapes from the period. As a historian, I’d quite like to see the
Natural History Museum do just that – continue doing its cutting edge science
in the labs which are out of bounds to the public, but recreate within
Waterhouse’s extraordinary building the collections as they would have looked in
the 1870s, to give us again the Victorian Natural History Museum. A Natural
History Museum which brought to life Victorian England (its ideals, aesthetics,
beliefs), could teach us a lesson in British social and cultural history, the
history of science, and the history of museums, while keeping all that intriguing
taxidermy centre-stage. That might be a novel and stimulating way of utilising,
and honouring, this unique building. But as a historian, and a thwarted
zoologist, I’m bound to say that.
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| Photo by Alh1 |
