Cathedral of Nature
The Central Hall is testament to the vision of the Museum’s founder, Richard Owen. Owen wanted the new Museum to be grand, fit for the status of Victorian Britain and spacious enough to display large mammals such as whales and elephants, as well as extinct monsters such as Diplodocus , a cast of which has stood in here for the past 100 years.
When Richard Owen took charge of the natural history collections at the British Museum in Bloomsbury, the British Empire was expanding and explorers were discovering exotic new species of animals and plants in far-flung places. This fuelled Owen’s determination to create a museum that would do justice to this amazing diversity of nature.