Natural History Museum and Science Museum

Right next to the V & A, you will find the Natural History Museum. Officially known as the British Museum (Natural History) up until 1992, it was legally separated from the British Museum back n 1963. The building was designed with a Victorian style architecture, completed in 1880. It houses an amazing collection of 80 million items of life and earth science specimens in botany, entomology, mineralogy, paleontology and zoology.

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Behind the Natural History Museum on Exhibition Road is The Science Museum, which was founded in 1857, from the collection of the Royal Society of Arts and surplus items from the Great Exhibition. The science items were separated and became a collection of the Museum of Patents in 1858. In 1909, the Science Museum came into existence as an independent entity. It currently holds a collection of over 300,000 items, including famous ones such as, among others: the first jet engine, James Watson’s model of DNA and Stephenson’s Rocket.