Discovering the Natural History Museum

By Christopher Howse 409PM GMT twelve March 2010

The Natural History Museum was voted London"s majority appropriate free captivate last year Photo Alamy

David Attenborough summed up his impressions of the Natural History Museum for a six-part radio array that starts this week "The front pathway is flattering considerable stuff. Youre in to something special."

Hes right. If the 3 million visitors who flow by that starting point each year stop to look, theyll see it framed by a gold of tree trunks, reproduced in terracotta. Step at the back of and the pathway appears as a uncanny take on a Gothic arch, as the designer intended.

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Inside, the caller flips in in between a stand in prophesy hundreds of animals, vital and extinct, decorated in terracotta; and enormous pattern framing a cathedral of healthy history. This Museum of Life (as the BBC array is called) houses 70 million specimens.

"Beyond the open displays is unequivocally where the notable relic begins," says array presenter Jimmy Doherty. Is that true? History suggests not. Its opening in 1881 over a lifes aspiration for the founder, the palaeontologist Richard Owen a notable relic with free entrance for all, introducing the total of the animal and plant kingdoms. And the construction that tourists know currently still expresses the strange message.

From the opening it annoyed extreme controversy. "A critical inapplicable designation has been done in the construction of a construction with such blow up and exuberant inner decorations for notable relic purposes," commented the biography Nature in 1881. The Field claimed that it was "ornamented if so it competence be termed both outwardly and internally with improper and unusual representations of animals".

Yet it scarcely unsuccessful to be built at all. When Richard Owen became superintendent of the healthy story dialect of the British Museum in 1856, a variety of equipment was congested in to old buildings in Bloomsbury a pressed bison, a sea iguana from Darwins excursion of the Beagle and a 17th-century "vegetable lamb from Tartary".

The Natural History pick up indispensable space, lots of it. What it scarcely got was a used monstrosity, for in 1862 "one of the ugliest open buildings that was ever lifted in this country", as The Builder called it, became vacant. It was a leviathan stretching 1,152 feet along Cromwell Road, on the site where the notable relic right away stands.

This powerful construction housed the International Exhibition of 1862. Everyone knows about the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Crystal Palace. Its inheritor is as unknown, as no disbelief the Millennium Dome will be in 150 years.

It was the heated brainchild of one of those overheated Victorians who died immature Francis Fowke. This Captain in the Royal Engineers, elderly 31, helped mountain the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855. He got to know Prince Albert, and only as importantly Henry Cole, the disintegrating hustler at the back of the initial of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Fowke, with no architectural qualifications, got the big pursuit for the 1862 muster since of his connections. The construction went up at a drunken speed. Its main underline was the greatest architecture in the world, done of glass. Then Fowke motionless to have it dual domes. Their polyhedral figure looked lopsided, an rivalry job them "tumid bubbles, with a immature and halftransparent stain of gooseberry".

Such jibes competence have assured story that Fowkes pattern was definitely despicable, had it not been for conspicuous � la mode photographs by William England, of the outrageous space pressed with exhibits and visitors.

Six million saw the show. Among them was Dostoevsky, who wrote that "a feeling of fright someway creeps over you. It is a Biblical sight, something to do with Babylon, a little anticipation out of the Apocalypse."

Once it closed, this majority large and clumsy of white elephants was earmarked as a home for Owens new Natural History Museum. But the government, carrying cumulative the site, unsuccessful to convince Parliament to buy the building, too. Most of the materials were carted off to turn piece of Alexandra Palace. The realistic stays were blown up with impressive person by Sapper friends of Fowkes.

This hotchpotch of rubbish and well-bred condemnation reached a low when Fowke won a foe in 1864 to pattern a new construction on the site for the Natural History Museum. Obligingly, from the outlook of history, he died of a detonate red blood vessel only prior to Christmas.

Enter Alfred Waterhouse. Still in his mid-thirties, he had not long ago cumulative the commission to set up Strangeways Prison in Manchester. In becoming different Fowkes plans he had to overcome antithesis from Henry Cole and Queen Victoria herself. Richard Owen valid an fan of vision.

The wide, highly evolved executive space in that Museum of Life shows young kids open-mouthed at the 83ft dinosaur diplodocus was dictated by Owen as an "Index Museum", introducing visitors to all categories of hold up from fleas to a pressed whale.

Waterhouse, resolutely dropping Fowkes rebirth style, spoken that south German Romanesque was improved matched to the kind of embellishment with "objects of healthy history" that Owen wanted. No Gothic cathedral ever looked similar to Waterhouses creation.

The total thing is lonesome with illusory terracotta animals and plants archaic in the easterly wing; working in the west. A monster of a hoofed mammal, the Great Paleotherium, sits on the roofline. Flying fish fool around on the lightning conductors and dragonflies land on the air vents. On the arches of the Central Hall stand 78 monkeys, all to Waterhouses design. More than 300 such sculptures were done from his drawings in in between 1875 and 1878.

Terracotta, that lent itself to mass production, was a prohibited potato at a time when a widespread management in aesthetics was John Ruskin. He insisted on craftsmanship as a key to beauty and amicable responsibility. At Oxford, the not long ago finished University Museum of Natural History boasted mill embellishment forged in situ by dual Irish sculptors, John and James OShea. They cut animals on columns to their own fancy, even caricaturing university officials.

In his make use of of terracotta, Waterhouse managed to win capitulation of the Ruskinians whilst embodying the ultimate systematic discoveries. As a musical skin, terracotta was to the Victorians what marble was to Gothic Venetians. Before being oven baked it could be created by a hand craftsman to imitate "the expect work of the artist". Waterhouse initial checked his sketches with a highbrow on the notable relic staff, afterwards relied for the clay modelling on a sure Monsieur Dujardin. Not most is well known about him, but Ruskin himself is thought to have praised the "charming details" he combined to the architectural ornament that visitors see today.

Common themes remain. Museum of Life shows stream investigate in Mauritius in to a cache of 7,500 skeleton of archaic hulk tortoises and dodos. The dodo facilities prominently between Waterhouses panels. It looks for all the universe similar to an painting by Tenniel for Alice in Wonderland, and with great reason. Both Tenniel and Waterhouse drew the bird from a 17th-century work of art embellished by January Savery prior to the extinction.

If the opening of the notable relic was the epitome of Waterhouses enthusiast Richard Owen, Museum of Life shows Owens prophesy in retreat. Gone is his Index Museum. The BBC cameras show a statue of Darwin, whose speculation of expansion Owen bitterly opposed, being hoisted in to on all sides on the grand drifting staircase where his own representation once stood.

- Museum of Life starts on BBC Two at 8.00pm on Thursday