BRITISH MUSEUM |
Photos © Ruud Leeuw
It seemed fitting to open this page with 'some royalty'... The King Edward VII's Galleries were opened on 07May1914.
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The British Museum was established in 1753, largely based on the collections of the physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane. The museum first opened to the public on 15 January 1759 in Montagu House in Bloomsbury, on the site of the current museum building. Its expansion over the following two and a half centuries was largely a result of an expanding British colonial footprint and has resulted in the creation of several branch institutions, the first being the British Museum (Natural History) in South Kensington in 1881. Until 1997, when the British Library (previously centred on the Round Reading Room) moved to a new site, the British Museum housed both a national museum of antiquities and a national library in the same building. The size of this museum is indeed of such that one has to enter with a plan on what to visit!
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