The British Museum

About eight million objects covering two million years of human history, held by a body corporate that cannot easily give any of them away. The strength is comparative rather than national: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome, and the Islamic, Chinese, Japanese and South Asian collections sit in one building on one level, so a visitor can walk from Nineveh to Athens to Benin City in twenty minutes. That adjacency is the museum's own argument for itself, and it is also precisely what the restitution claims contest. Nothing here is encyclopaedic by accident: the collection was assembled through the same imperial networks that the museum now documents on its own contested objects pages.

In 1753 an Act of Parliament created what the museum describes as the world's first free national public museum, and it opened its doors in 1759 to all studious and curious persons. Free did not mean open. Visitors had to apply for tickets within limited hours, which in practice meant well-connected people being walked round by trustees and curators. Only from the 1830s were the regulations loosened and the hours extended. The founding purchase was the collection of Sir Hans Sloane, physician and President of the Royal Society, who had amassed more than 80,000 natural and artificial rarities alongside a library of over 40,000 books and manuscripts and 32,000 coins and medals; the 1753 Act bought it for the public together with the Cotton, Harley and Royal Libraries. The museum states plainly on its own history page that Sloane collected through the networks European imperial expansion had created, and financed his purchases with income partly derived from enslaved labour on Jamaican sugar plantations. That sentence is the museum's, not ours, and it is the right place to start.

The building is Greek Revival, four wings around a courtyard, 43 columns and a pedimented portico, and it took thirty years. Sir Robert Smirke began in 1823 and the quadrangle was completed in 1852, using what was then advanced construction: concrete floors, a cast-iron frame filled in with London stock brick, and Portland stone on the show face. In 1853 it won the Royal Institute of British Architects' Gold Medal. The south front measures 112.7 metres and the columns stand 13.7 metres high. The main entrance was the last wing built, because Montagu House, the seventeenth-century mansion that had held the collection since 1759, had to come down first. Sir Richard Westmacott carved the tympanum as the Progress of Civilisation, eight stages of mankind rising from ignorance to learning, originally painted against a blue ground. The first wing to go up was the King's Library, now the Enlightenment Gallery, built for George III's collection of more than 65,000 books which his son gave to the nation in 1823. It is 91 metres long and 12 metres high, and its ceiling needed cast-iron beams to carry it. It was finished in 1831, shown to a privileged few by ticket, and not fully opened to all visitors until 1857.

By the early 1850s the library needed more space, and Antonio Panizzi, Keeper of Printed Books, had the idea of filling the empty central courtyard with a round room. Sydney Smirke, who had taken over from his brother Robert in 1845, designed it; work began in 1854 and finished three years later. The dome is 42.6 metres across and was inspired by the Pantheon, but it is not a free-standing dome at all: it is built in segments on a cast-iron framework, and the ceiling hangs from iron struts and is made of papier-mache. Around it went iron bookstacks holding three miles of bookcases and 25 miles of shelves. The Reading Room opened on 2 May 1857, and in a one-off public viewing that month more than 62,000 people came to look at it. Readers applied in writing for a ticket from the Principal Librarian; Karl Marx, Bram Stoker and Arthur Conan Doyle held them, and Lenin signed in under the name Jacob Richter. In 1997 the books went to the new British Library at St Pancras and the bookstacks came down. This matters for anyone reading about this building: the British Library has been a separate institution since 1973, and the volumes now on the Enlightenment Gallery shelves are on loan from the House of Commons library. The Reading Room today holds the museum's archive, open by appointment, not a public reading room.

Smirke had meant the courtyard to be a garden. From 1852 it filled with bookstacks instead, and for nearly 150 years the centre of the museum was invisible to the public. When the library left in 1997 the museum ran a competition to reopen it, drawing more than 130 entries; Foster and Partners won. The Queen Elizabeth II Great Court opened on 6 December 2000, two acres under a glass and steel roof loosely derived from Foster's Reichstag concept in Berlin, with the Reading Room standing free at its centre. The project cost 100 million pounds, supported by 30 million from the Millennium Commission and 15.75 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund, and on completion it grew the museum by forty per cent. For the first time in over 150 years visitors could walk right round the main floor. The redesign also produced the Sainsbury Galleries for the Africa collection, the Wellcome Trust Gallery, Room 35 for temporary exhibitions, and the Clore Centre for Education below. At its twentieth anniversary the museum counted 113 million people who had walked under the roof. It remains free and open every day, and it closes half an hour after the galleries do.

The museum publishes an index of contested objects from its own collection, and the list is the honest measure of the problem: Asante gold regalia, the Benin Bronzes, human remains, the Maqdala collection, the moai from Rapa Nui, the Parthenon Sculptures, an early Australian shield, and provenance research for 1933 to 1945. On the Parthenon it holds 15 metopes, 17 pedimental figures and 75 metres of frieze; a formal Greek request for permanent return was first made in 1983; the trustees say they will consider any loan request but that no loan request has ever been received, and that successive Greek governments have refused to acknowledge their title. On Benin the museum's own account is unsparing: a retaliatory expedition took Benin City in February 1897, the Oba's palace was burned, its shrines were looted, and thousands of objects left as official spoils of war or were distributed by rank. It holds over 900 Benin objects and shows more than 100 on rotation. On Maqdala it holds more than 90 objects from Emperor Tewodros II's fortress, including eleven tabots which the Ethiopian Orthodox Church understands to represent the Ark of the Covenant; these are not displayed, and the museum's stated long-term ambition is to lend them to an Ethiopian Orthodox church in Britain. The Amaravati sculptures, of which this archive holds a record, are not on that contested list at all. Neither is the Rosetta Stone.

The reason so many of these arguments end in stalemate is statutory. The British Museum Act 1963 established the museum as a body corporate and set out what the trustees may do with what they hold. Section 5 lets them sell, exchange or give away an object only in narrow cases: if it is a duplicate; if it was made no earlier than 1850 and consists substantially of printed matter of which they hold a photographic copy; or if in their opinion it is unfit to be retained and can go without detriment to the interests of students. Section 5 also lets them destroy or dispose of an object that has become useless through damage, deterioration or infestation, and requires any money raised to be spent on buying more objects. Nothing in it contemplates returning an object because of how it was acquired. The same Act separated the Natural History Museum, which had been the British Museum's natural history department, into an independent institution with its own trustees; the two are routinely confused and the confusion is now sixty years out of date. Any government wanting to change what the trustees may deaccession has to change the Act, and no government has.

On 1 August 2023 the museum announced that items from the collection had been found missing, stolen or damaged, that a member of staff had been dismissed and would face legal action, and that the Economic Crime Command of the Metropolitan Police was investigating. It said the majority were small pieces from a storeroom: gold jewellery and gems of semi-precious stones and glass, dating from the fifteenth century BC to the nineteenth century AD, none recently on display and kept mainly for research. It commissioned an independent review under the former trustee Sir Nigel Boardman and Lucy D'Orsi, Chief Constable of the British Transport Police, later joined by Ian Karet. What the review established, as reported by Martin Bailey in The Art Newspaper, was worse than the first announcement implied: 2,000 objects taken or damaged, and terms of reference dating the losses to the period from 1993 to 2022. Of a thirty-page report, four pages of recommendations were published. Ittai Gradel, the Danish gems specialist who had privately warned the museum in 2020, said publicly that the published report contained nothing about what the museum had specifically done wrong. The trustees accepted the recommendations, which centre on registering objects that were never properly recorded. For a provenance archive that is the lesson: the objects that went were the ones nobody had written down.

As of 4 August 2026 the museum is open daily from 10:00 to 17:00, until 20:30 on Fridays, closed only from 24 to 26 December, with last entry at 16:45. Entry to the permanent collection is free. Special exhibitions are ticketed: Korea runs from 1 October 2026 to 31 January 2027 in Room 35 with adult tickets from 14 pounds on an early bird offer, and a Bayeux Tapestry experience, described as a historic loan from France, runs from 10 September 2026 to 11 July 2027. Several other exhibitions are free. The museum warns that galleries may close at short notice and that it cannot always give notice. Behind that warning sits the Masterplan, the programme to restore the mainly pre-1914 building and redisplay the whole permanent collection, whose first phase was the BM_ARC storage and research facility near Reading, opened in 2023. It was originally called the Rosetta Project; the museum dropped that name in 2023, and The Art Newspaper read the change as a response to the Rosetta Stone's contested status. The work will run for years and take the galleries in stages. Anyone travelling to see one particular object should check that its room is open on the day, and should not assume that a gallery photographed five years ago still looks that way.

We publish no visitor prose and cite no platform star average. What follows comes from the museum's own statements and from named journalism. ALVA recorded 6,440,120 visits in 2025, down one per cent, which made this the second most visited attraction in the United Kingdom behind the Natural History Museum. Entry is free and always has been, the collection runs to about eight million objects, and more than 50 galleries are open. Against that, the museum tells visitors to book a free timed ticket because entry otherwise depends on capacity, warns that galleries close at short notice without notice, and is entering a rebuilding programme that will take the displays apart gallery by gallery for years. The thefts disclosed in 2023 and the restitution claims the museum itself lists are not footnotes to the visit; they are the argument the building is now in.