The British Museum is a museum dedicated to human history and culture. Its permanent collection, numbering some eight million works, is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence and originates from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present.
The British Museum was established in 1753, largely based on the collections of the physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane. The museum first opened to the public on 15 January 1759 in Montagu House in Bloomsbury, on the site of the current museum building. Its expansion over the following two and a half centuries was largely a result of an expanding British colonial footprint.
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The designer was the Aberdeen architect Alexander Marshall Mackenzie (qv http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Marshall_Mackenzie ). All the interior and most of the timber and marble were brought from Australia. [Visitor's London, 1973].