There are exquisite jewel green beetles, butterfly species by the thousand, fossils, deep sea creatures, Darwin’s original collecting albums, even a meteorite that landed in Egypt 80 years ago from Mars. The fabulous diversity of the natural world in which we live is all there at the Natural History Museum in London, and now a spectacular new wing, the Darwin Centre, which opens next week, will allow us a radically expanded degree of access both to the collections and to the people who gather and study them.
The building itself is a triumph. Designed by the Scandinavian architectural practice, C.F. Møller, the new wing takes the form of a massive white concrete cocoon that sits with surprising civility within a glass and steel box. The 65m (210ft) tall curved structure, which is clad in creamy smooth Venetian plaster, dominates all views, looming up and out of sight from wherever the visitor stands.
As a 21st-century answer to Waterhouse’s original and highly decorative Victorian museum building, it is undoubtedly spectacular and achieves its aim of symbolising the boldness with which the museum is facing the future.
The glories of the museum’s contents are available for viewing in new high-tech format along a sloping spiral path that winds down through the cocoon.
Walking through feels like burrowing through an egg and visitors can engage (safely) along the way with mosquitoes and the barcoding of their DNA, with a range of lively interactive displays, and with young and enthusiastic scientists — many of them women — who will stop their work and tell you, through the glass windows onto their laboratories, about the insect wings they are mapping, or the new species that has just been fished out of the sea off the coast of Norway.
The colourful beauty of the insects is breathtaking and it is thrilling to watch a seemingly ordinary lump of rock, found in Devon, being stripped down under the lens of a computer to reveal the web of gold seams running like an incredibly complex lattice under its surface. The aesthetic beauty of science is very much on display here.
The Darwin Centre will change public perceptions of what the Natural History Museum is. Having only ever imagined dusty and dimly lit backstage corridors of specimen boxes, we can have not only far better and more detailed access to the collections, but we will also be able to see inside some of the working laboratories or view them via camera link-ups.
As a project to engage the public with science and to demonstrate its relevance to society, it has a very great potential for success.
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