A Room Nobody Has Seen Since 1943: The Natural History Museum's Experiment in Building a Gallery in Public

On 16 September, a door opens in South Kensington that has been shut to visitors since the middle of the Second World War. The room behind it sits directly above the Natural History Museum’s main entrance, on the second floor of Alfred Waterhouse’s terracotta cathedral, and it mirrors the mineral gallery on the other side of the building — the same proportions, the same arched light, the same sense of a space built when museums still believed architecture was part of the argument.

It was once the osteology gallery, a hall of skeletons, and later a mammals gallery. Then wartime bombing damaged the museum’s herbarium, the botanical collections needed somewhere to go, and the room was closed and filled with wooden cabinets. It has been a working store ever since.

What reopens this month is not, strictly speaking, the finished thing. That is the interesting part.

A prototype, not a launch

The display is called Nature and Us, it is free, and it runs until March 2028 — eighteen months. It gathers fifty objects around a single question: how has our relationship with the natural world changed, and what did we think we were doing at each stage? The selection is deliberately unruly. There is a hand-axe roughly four hundred thousand years old. There is Jenny, the Victorian skeleton of a monk seal, whose presence in the collection is a small record of how wild animals were once treated as entertainment. There is a miniature model of a Crystal Palace dinosaur, the Victorian idea of prehistory in palm-sized form. And there is a Star Wars toy from the 1980s, encrusted with bryozoans after long enough in the sea to have been colonised — plastic that has become, without asking, a habitat. Visitors can touch a replica jaw from one of Britain’s earliest known domesticated dogs, dated to around 14,300 years ago.

The point of the run is not simply to fill the space while the museum works out what to do with it. Visitors are being asked, explicitly, which of these stories should survive into the permanent gallery that will occupy the same room in 2029. The museum is testing its own ideas on the audience before committing them to a decade of fixed casework.

Why building in public is unusual

This is rarer than it sounds. The conventional national-museum gallery is developed behind a hoarding over three to five years, opened with an evening reception, and then left more or less alone for fifteen. Consultation happens, but it happens early, in focus groups and advisory panels, and by the time the public sees anything the interpretive decisions are cast in vinyl and joinery. If a section does not work, nobody can do anything about it until the next capital round.

Nature and Us inverts that. It puts the draft on the wall, lets three or four million visitors walk through it, and treats their responses as evidence rather than reassurance. The risk is obvious — a gallery assembled by popularity can end up with all the loved objects and none of the argument — and the museum will have to hold its nerve about what it keeps for curatorial reasons rather than vote count. But the alternative is the far commoner failure, which is spending several million pounds discovering that a story that worked brilliantly in a meeting room does not survive contact with a Tuesday-afternoon crowd of tired families.

There is also an honesty to it. The original herbarium cabinets are staying in place. The room is not being scrubbed of its own history as a working scientific store; the eighty years of use are visible as part of what you are looking at.

The wider context

This is one move in a large programme. The museum’s NHM150 project — a £550 million redevelopment running to its 150th anniversary in 2031 — is opening a new or revitalised gallery every year, with 2025’s Fixing Our Broken Planet having already taken three million visitors and a space for young children due in 2027. Roughly a third of the archive collection is moving to a new research and storage centre near Reading, which is what frees the square footage in South Kensington. Around £400 million of the cost is secured, largely from government, leaving £150 million to raise.

What smaller galleries might take from it

Most independent spaces will never contemplate a £550 million capital plan, but the underlying method scales down almost perfectly, and cheaply. Hanging a provisional selection, telling visitors plainly that it is provisional, and asking them what they would keep costs nothing beyond the nerve to admit you have not decided yet. Small galleries often assume that visible uncertainty reads as amateurism. The evidence from the other direction — a national museum with every resource available choosing to show its working — suggests the opposite. Audiences respond well to being treated as participants in a decision rather than recipients of a finished verdict.

There is a version of curatorial authority that depends on never being seen to deliberate. South Kensington is quietly betting that a better one depends on the reverse.

Nature and Us opens at the Natural History Museum, London, on 16 September 2026 and runs until March 2028. Entry is free.