London Today

Museums 2 min read

A gallery closed to the public since 1943 reopens this month

A tall paper archway in red, orange and deep red opening onto a pale cream interior

Museums usually reopen rooms that closed for refurbishment. This one closed during the Second World War and stayed shut.

The opening

Nature & Us opens at the Natural History Museum on 16 September 2026. Entry is free. The space it occupies has been closed to the public since 1943.

The objects doing the work

Three of them explain the gallery's argument better than any wall text could.

A 400,000-year-old hand-axe — the point at which the relationship starts being one-directional. A touchable replica of one of Britain's first domesticated dogs, which is the moment another species was rebuilt to suit us. And a 1980s Star Wars toy encrusted with bryozoans, dredged from the sea, where the process has run the other way and nature has claimed the manufactured object back.

Why the last one is the best exhibit

The hand-axe and the dog are the story museums have told for decades. The colonised toy is the harder idea: that the boundary between the natural and the made has stopped being a boundary. A plastic figure that spent forty years growing a reef is not pollution illustrated, it is a habitat.

It also does something a diorama cannot. Everyone over forty recognises the toy. Recognition is what turns a display case into an uncomfortable thought.

The free part is not incidental

A gallery about humanity's relationship with the natural world that charged admission would be making a slightly awkward argument. Free entry means it can be visited in twenty minutes, repeatedly, by people who live nearby — which is how a permanent gallery actually earns its place.

New free galleries at South Kensington follow a predictable curve: heavy for the first six weekends, then quiet on weekday mornings within a term. The museum's least-used entrance is the Exhibition Road side, which also puts you nearer this end of the building than the queue on Cromwell Road does.

Source: Londonist checked against the source

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