British Museum by Sir Robert Smirke

"Smirke was unflinching in his admiration for Greek architecture, which he described as "magnificent without ostentation" "

- Jack Watkins

RICHARD JEFFERIES contrasted the pigeons outside the British Museum (To them the building is merely a rock, pierced with convenient caverns') with the humans vainly seeking enlightenment inside, in an article first published in the Pall Mall Gazette and subsequently reprinted in his The Life of the Fields (1884). Jefferies admitted he felt 'nearer knowledge' standing beneath its portico and enjoying the 'southern blue' of the sky than when turning a book's pages in its former Reading Room. Many of us may have felt a similar feeling of a great weight slipping from our shoulders on departure from this august, but exhausting, place.

The British Museum was the world's first public museum and the first stone of the present building was laid 200 years ago this year. The museum's origins pre-dated that, however, arising out of the library, and botany and natural history specimens, of Sir Hans Sloane, purchased for the nation on his death in 1753 and subsequently augmented with manuscripts and antiquities from other collectors. These were presented in the specially acquired Montagu House, built by Robert Hooke for the 1st Duke of Montagu in the 1670s.

Old paintings show it to have been a large, red-brick building reminiscent of Kensington Palace, with a leafy outlook unimaginable now. It opened as the British Museum in 1759, but, by the early 19th century, it was plain the collection was outgrowing the premises. When the Elgin Marbles arrived in 1816, they were initially housed in a temporarily erected shed.

In 1820, Sir Robert Smirke (1780-1867) was commissioned to begin preparations for the construction of a new building on the same site. The work was undertaken in stages, with parts of the old house only demolished as sections of the new building went up in its place.