Natural History Museum

Lonely Planet review

A mammoth institution dedicated to the Victorian pursuit of collecting and cataloguing. Walking into the Life Galleries, in the 1880 Gothic Revival building off Cromwell Rd, evokes the musty moth-eaten era of the Victorian gentleman scientist. The main museum building, with its blue and sand-coloured brick and terracotta, was designed by Alfred Waterhouse and is as impressive as the towering diplodocus dinosaur skeleton in the entrance hall.

It's hard to match any of the exhibits with this initial sight, except for maybe the huge (but a bit tired-looking) blue whale.

Children, who are the main fans of this museum, are primed for more primeval wildlife by the dinosaur skeleton, and yank their parents to the Dinosaur gallery to see the roaring and tail-flicking animatronic T-rex dinosaur, the museum's star attraction (at least from the kiddies' point of view).

The Life Galleries are full of fossils and glass cases of taxidermied birds, and the antiquated atmosphere is mesmerising. There is also a stunning room on creepy crawlies, the Ecology Gallery's Quadrascope video wall and the vast Darwin Centre of zoological specimens. The first phase of the Darwin Centre opened in 2002, and focuses on taxonomy (the study of the natural world), with some 450,000 jars of pickled specimens shown off during free guided tours every half-hour. The even-more-ambitious phase II of the Darwin Centre, estimated to cost over around £70 million, will showcase some 28 million insects and six million plants in 'a giant cocoon', due to open in 2009.

The second part of the museum, the Earth Galleries, is a thoroughly contemporary affair, exchanging the Victorian creakiness for a sleek, modern design. The entrance lies on Exhibition Rd and its main hall's black walls are lined with crystals, gems and precious rocks. Four life-size human statues herald the way to the escalator, which slithers up through a hollowed-out globe into displays about our planet's geological make-up. Volcanoes, earthquakes and storms are all discussed on the upper floor, but the star attraction inside the Restless Surface gallery, the Kobe earthquake mock-up - a model of a small Japanese grocery shop that trembles in a manner meant to replicate the 1995 earthquake - is disappointingly lame. Better exhibitions on the lower floors focus on ecology, look at gems and other precious stones and explore how planets are formed.

The Wildlife Garden (April to October, admission around £2 ) displays a range of British lowland habitats.

To avoid crowds during school-term time, it's best to visit early morning or late afternoon, or early on weekend mornings year-round.