The British Museum

The British Museum is defined by its massive neoclassical facade, featuring a row of soaring stone columns that stretch across the street in Bloomsbury. Established in seventeen fifty-three, it was the first public national museum in the world, created by an Act of Parliament to house the vast, eclectic collection of Sir Hans Sloane. Sloane was a prominent royal physician who amassed over seventy thousand objects—from coins and manuscripts to natural specimens—through global networks that relied heavily on the profits of slave-worked sugar plantations in Jamaica.