British Museum

The British Museum: The Repatriation Argument and Why You Should Visit Anyway

The Elgin Marbles debate is not going away. The carved panels from the Parthenon have been in the British Museum since Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin, removed them between 1801 and 1812 with Ottoman permission that Greece now argues was legally invalid. The British government has consistently refused to return them; the Greek government has consistently requested their return; the argument repeats every few years in the press. There is a reasonable case on both sides. What’s certain is that the sculptures are extraordinary, fifth-century BCE carving of the highest quality, and that the museum’s display of them is serious and well-lit.

The same question, in different forms, applies to the Rosetta Stone (Egyptian), the Benin Bronzes (Nigerian), and much of the rest of what makes the British Museum one of the most significant collections in the world. The collection’s existence is partly the result of empire, and the museum is increasingly honest about this in its labelling. Coming to a personal view on the ethics of visiting is your own work; what’s not in dispute is that several million objects spanning two million years of human history are here, free to enter, in one of the best-designed museum spaces in the world.

What to Prioritise

The museum has eight million objects; the majority are in storage. The Great Court under Norman Foster’s glass roof is the arrival space, and the Reading Room at its centre houses temporary exhibitions.

Room 4 (Ancient Egypt): the Rosetta Stone is here, in the middle of the room, surrounded by visitors photographing it. Read the text on the stone before you photograph it, it’s a priestly decree from 196 BCE, with no inherent significance beyond the fact that it was written in three scripts and allowed 19th-century scholars to decode hieroglyphics. The context is more interesting than the stone.

Room 18 (Parthenon sculptures): the Elgin Marbles occupy their own dedicated gallery. The frieze sections depicting the Panathenaic festival procession, cavalrymen, cattle, musicians, are extraordinary works of 5th-century BCE sculpture. Stand at the gallery entrance and look at the full length of the frieze to understand the scale.

Room 41 (Sutton Hoo): the Sutton Hoo helmet, found in a 7th-century Anglo-Saxon ship burial in Suffolk in 1939, is one of the most striking objects in the museum. The face-mask design is fierce and hieratic; the craftsmanship is exceptional. The burial treasure around it, gold shoulder clasps, a decorated purse, makes the room one of the finest assemblages of early medieval European metalwork anywhere.

Room 5 (Ancient Egypt, upper floor): mummies. The preserved bodies, their cartonnage cases, and the objects placed with them represent the most comprehensive ancient Egyptian funerary collection outside Cairo. The technical quality of the mummification visible in the unwrapped specimens is confronting and informative simultaneously.

Room 40 (Medieval Europe): the Lewis Chessmen, 78 chess pieces carved from walrus ivory around 1150-1200, probably in Norway. Bishops, queens, knights, their expressions suggest personalities rather than chess positions. One of the most human objects in the building.

Practical Notes

Entry is free. The museum is on Great Russell Street in Bloomsbury, London, accessible from Tottenham Court Road, Holborn, or Russell Square tube stations. The main entrance is through the Great Russell Street gate.

The museum gets extremely crowded on weekends and in summer. Tuesday or Wednesday morning opening (when the museum opens at 10am) is the quietest visiting window. The galleries on the upper floors (Greek, Roman, medieval Europe) are consistently less crowded than the Egyptian and prehistoric rooms.

Allow at least half a day for a meaningful visit. Full-day visits are possible; the museum’s scope makes it genuinely inexhaustible.