Closed to the Public Since WWII, a ‘Hidden’ Gallery at London’s Natural History Museum Opens Its Doors Once Again

This September, a little-known room in London’s Natural History Museum will reopen its doors to the public for the first time since World War II. The Nature and Us gallery will offer visitors up-close encounters with 50 eclectic objects from the museum’s collections, ranging in age from a few decades to many millennia. As the exhibition’s name suggests, the diverse collection traces the ways humans have understood and interacted with the natural world—and how those encounters have, in turn, influenced our culture, values and ideas.

When the Natural History Museum opened in 1881, architect Alfred Waterhouse had decorated the building with elaborate terracotta carvings of animals and plants. Extinct species appear on the building’s eastern side, while living species—including lions and cobras—decorate the western side. During World War II, scientists worked on the grounds of the museum on wartime research, and some galleries were used to train members of Britain’s secret intelligence networks.

Bombing raids shattered windows and damaged collections throughout the building, including the General Herbarium. The gallery that would become Nature and Us was subsequently repurposed to house botanical specimens that had survived the destruction, displacing skeletons and mammal specimens into other storage areas. When the gallery reopens on September 16, its original wooden cases will highlight a new eclectic set of objects.

Among them are the skeleton of a Victorian monk seal named Jenny, who was previously described to crowds as “the talking fish”; a replica jaw from a 14,300-year-old dog from Gough’s Cave, an early example of a domesticated dog in Britain; and a 1980s Star Wars toy encrusted in bryozoan, a coral-like aquatic invertebrate. Each are meant to convey the connections between humans and nature. The exhibition also brings to life other pieces of institutional lore, including stories that reveal how scientific understanding has changed over time.

Visitors will see a 400,000-year-old handaxe found in a French quarry alongside the remains of a woolly mammoth, a discovery that helped establish the immense antiquity of humanity. The Guardian’s Maev Kennedy reported in 2009 that the axe had been dubbed “the stone that shattered the time barrier,” and it was presented at the Royal Society on May 26, 1859, six months before Darwin published On the Origin of Species. A Victorian miniature model of one of the famed Crystal Palace dinosaurs will also be on view, offering a glimpse into how early scientists and artists imagined prehistoric life.

The sculptures, while based on the scientific knowledge available at the time, incorporated features that later discoveries showed to be inaccurate. They were first displayed in 1854, and today stand in London’s Crystal Palace Park. The gallery’s reopening is the newest phase in the museum’s ongoing NHM150 project, a fundraising campaign that aims to open or renovate one gallery each year leading up to its 150th anniversary in 2031.