Travel By Photos – The British Museum

The British Museum, one of the largest museum in the world with more than 7 million collections on display. Collections includes illustration and documentation of the story of human culture from its beginning to the present. It is one of the travel destination in London that visitors shouldn’t miss. For budget Europe travelers like me, there is a good news: Its entrance is free! 🙂 I’ve been there twice. Once before the introduction of the Great Court and once after, which is recently. I prefer my first visit where it housed both the National Museum and National Library under one roof. After the year of 1997, the section of National Library had moved to a new building called British Library near Kings Cross train station and the original space in British Library has then been converted into the Great Court as you can see now.

I’m not touching too much on the history of British Museum as well as its introduction. For more information on the museum, check out its official site of British Museum. It is located in the heart of London, next to the main shopping area of Oxford Street and SOHO area at Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3DG. View Google map for actual location. Here are what you can’t find in the official website: The actual photos of collections in the museum. You can access them yourself before deciding whether to spend a morning or afternoon session in here…

You will never miss the grand entrance of British Museum even from far when you are coming here from Oxford Street. The facade is covered by full height concrete round pillars with a fairly large courtyard in front of the museum. It was a bad rainy morning with no sunlight where I needed to risk my camera to shoot this shot. People started to rush in though it was only 10 o’clock in the morning!

Once you step into the museum, on your left would be the original main stairs to the museum. Oh yeah, you should have picked up a floor plan of British Museum from the entrance guards before that you could figure out where and where later inside those halls. Haven’t been there before? Don’t worry, download one of them from the official website. 🙂

If you go straight in instead of turning left for the staircase, you will come to a grand skylight covered courtyard (used to be where the national library was) designed by Lord Foster, the famous local architect. It’s quite contrasty to the rest of the design. This reminds me of the Louvre (also with a skylight pyramid entrance cover designed by IM Pei).

The Great Court has now become the main entrance to the museum halls. There is an open cafe, information counter and public area surrounding the existing Reading Room in the centre. Inside the Reading room visitors can find various books and documentations as well as souvenirs about the museum.

This is the first hall we went into from the Great Court was the Living and Dying hall. The most famous statue is what you can see from the photo, the Hoa Hakananai human statue.

Next hall would be the Egyptian sculture hall. An ancient scripts carved on granite. King and Queen faced off each other?

A sculpture of a royal family…

At this stage, I swapped my camera lens to the Tamron SP10-24mm Ultra wide angle and it wonderfully capture this full height column!

How could I capture these motion blur effect on the above and below photos? Make sure to hold your camera super firm and shoot it at low shutter speed of 1/8 and you will get his result. 🙂

Room 6: Assyrian sculpture of Lion.

Room 6: Assyrian sculpture hall.

Further in would be halls housing sculptures from Greek and Romans.

Marble bust of Antinous, a creation from Rome.

The Portland Vase, one of the finest surviving piece of Roman glass.

On upper floor we found the largest hoard of medieval gold coins ever discovered in Nottingham, Britain in 3rd floor Hall 50.

Next to it is the Clock and watches hall 38-39.

The original concept of clocks.

Room 68 demonstrates the development of money across the world through a range of objects and examines how money has been used by diverse cultural groups.

The first cashier machine.

Hall 14: The greek vase

There are all together 3 main floors with 5 split levels. You can get lost in there if you are too concentrate on the objects on display. So, make sure to follow those unique features of staircase like this one above. 🙂

I think the most significant halls on 3rd floor are the ancient Egypt halls covering 5 halls from 61-66. They feature large number of ancient Egyptian tombs and mummies just second to the national museum of Cairo.

Mummies….

and mummies…

The Royal Burial of the 17th Dynasty of Thebes. Don’t ask me about the history though…

UPDATED: Click Here to view High Resolution version of the above travel photos of London

If you think it’s worth to visit the British Museum, plan your itinerary to cover the visit for 2 to 3 hours in the morning or afternoon, before or after your shopping hours in Oxford Street. SOHO is just somewhere around so you can have your dinner and night life after that. Enjoy! – Travel Feeder, your ultimate travel photo blog