I took a first look at the reopened Natural History Museum gallery that was shut for 83 years

The Natural History Museum has pledged to open a new gallery a year, every year until its 150th birthday in 2031, and while in most cases this will involve refreshes of spaces that were already open – eg next year the old Creepy Crawlies gallery will become a new children’s gallery – the process kicks off with the unsealing of a gallery that’s been closed to the public for 83 years.

A little history: back in the day the room was used to display animal skeletons (an osteology gallery if you’re being technical), which the Victorians were big fans of. After the NHM’s old herbarium (that’s collection of dried plant specimens to you) was damaged by a bomb during World War II, the room was repurposed in 1943 as the new herbarium. And now it’s making its return as a public space, entitled the Nature and Us gallery, ‘where visitors can explore our evolving relationship with the natural world through 50 remarkable objects.’

First impressions: it’s a very atmospheric space, largely because its walls are lined with row upon row of wooden filing cabinets, which are empty now, but once contained pressed, dried plants (a wooden filing cabinet is apparently not a great way of preserving pressed, dried plants). It’s a nice flourish, a peek into the NHM as a working building and a sense that we are indeed in an obscure corner of the gargantuan museum’s innards.

Tucked high up on the second floor near the cross section of giant sequoia tree, it’s not a particularly huge space, in part because only half of the gallery is actually open: a barrier bisects the room at the half-way mark and will do so for the next 18 months, until the entire gallery opens to the public in 2029. Still, it’s atmospheric and stuffed with fun little nooks and crannies – little spaces behind the wall of cabinets offer themed little sub rooms, like the one dedicated to the idea that come species are differentiated from others purely by the sound they make. 

In terms of the actual exhibition: the room is certainly big enough that the 50 objects feel quite spaced out. The theme is in the name – Nature and Us – but rather than make a single coherent argument about man’s relationship with nature it’s more like an interesting series of provocations, ranging from a display lightly examining whaling and our relationship with whales, to a consideration of rivers and forests that have been given the legal status of a living person. 

Overall I’d say it’s a nice, quirky space to dip into, in which the room is almost as much the star as the displays. It all feels a lot lighter and less object and information dense than the more famous galleries, something that will be underscored if it remains relatively quiet (which is hard to predict but the top of the museum is generally far less busy than the ground floor). It’s not insubstantial though: while there’s no lecturing about climate change (as the title perhaps suggests), but at the same time it does genuinely quite spikey and pointed: the section on ‘Jenny the talking fish’ (an unfortunate seal in disguise) certainly doesn’t paint the Victorians in a great light.

It won’t make you look at the NHM again in a new light, but it’s well worth a visit, and it goes without saying that it’s pretty amazing the gigantic building can just pull a space this big and impressive out of its forgotten depths.

Nature and Us is open daily on the second floor of the Natural History Museum. Entry is free.

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