Science Museum, London
The Science Museum is a major museum on Exhibition Road in South Kensington, London. It was founded in 1857 and is one of the city's major tourist attractions, attracting 3.3 million visitors annually in 2019.[2]
"The Science Museum" redirects here. For other museums of this name, see Science Museum (disambiguation). For the type of museum, see Science museum.Established
- 1857
- (separate status formalised 1909)
- Exhibition Road,
- Kensington & Chelsea London, SW7 2DD
- United Kingdom
2,956,886 (2023)[1]
Like other publicly funded national museums in the United Kingdom, the Science Museum does not charge visitors for admission, although visitors are requested to make a donation if they are able. Temporary exhibitions may incur an admission fee.
It is one of the five museums in the Science Museum Group.
The museum has some dedicated spaces for temporary exhibitions (both free and paid-for) and displays, on level −1 (Basement Gallery), level 0 (inside the Exploring Space Gallery and Tomorrow's World), level 1 (Special Exhibition Gallery 1) and level 2 (Special Exhibition Gallery 2 and The Studio). Most of these travel to other Science Museum Group sites, as well as nationally and internationally.
Past exhibitions have included:
Events[edit]
Astronights for Children[edit]
The Science Museum organises Astronights, "all-night extravaganza with a scientific twist". Up to 380 children aged between 7 and 11, accompanied by adults, are invited to spend an evening performing fun "science based" activities and then spend the night sleeping in the museum galleries amongst the exhibits. In the morning, they're woken to breakfast and more science, watching a show before the end of the event.[37]
'Lates' for Adults[edit]
On the evening of the last Wednesday of every month (except December) the museum organises an adults only evening with up to 30 events, from lectures to silent discos. Previous Lates have seen conversations with the actress activist Lily Cole[38] and Biorevolutions with the Francis Crick Institute which attracted around 7000 people, mostly under the age of 35.[39]
Cancellation of James D. Watson talk[edit]
In October 2007, the Science Museum cancelled a talk by the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, James D. Watson, because he claimed that IQ test results showed black people to have lower intelligence than white people. The decision was criticised by some scientists, including Richard Dawkins,[40] but supported by other scientists, including Steven Rose.[41]
The museum has undergone many changes in its history with older galleries being replaced by new ones.
Storage, library and archives[edit]
Blythe House, 1979–2019, the museum's former storage facility in West Kensington, while not a gallery, it offered tours of the collections housed there.[56] Objects formerly housed there are being transferred to the National Collections Centre, at the Science Museum Wroughton, in Wiltshire.[57]
The Science Museum has a dedicated library, and until the 1960s was Britain's National Library for Science, Medicine and Technology. It holds runs of periodicals, early books and manuscripts, and is used by scholars worldwide. It was, for a number of years, run in conjunction with the library of Imperial College, but in 2007 the library was divided over two sites. Histories of science and biographies of scientists were kept at the Imperial College Library until February 2014 when the arrangement was terminated, the shelves were cleared and the books and journals shipped out, joining the rest of the collection, which includes original scientific works and archives at the National Collections Centre.
Dana Research Centre and Library previously an event space and cafe, reopened in its current form in 2015. Open to researchers and members of the public, it allows free access to almost 7,000 volumes, which can be consulted on site.
The directors of the South Kensington Museum were:
The directors of the Science Museum have been:
The following have been head/director of the Science Museum in London, not including its satellite museums:
The following have been directors of the National Museum of Science and Industry, (since April 2012 renamed the Science Museum Group) which oversees the Science Museum and other related museums, from 2002:
