‘It’s a self-imposed act of institutional vandalism’: inside the Natural History Museum’s controversial relocation

There are nearly 1,000 specimens in the Natural History Museum’s ‘tank room’ – Rii Schroer

A fox stares out from a knee-height jar, limbs pressed to the glass, its fur a similar hue to the amber liquid it is engulfed in. This is one of nearly 1,000 specimens in the Natural History Museum’s ‘tank room’ – a metre or so away from a tortoise found by Charles Darwin in the Galapagos almost 200 years ago, and just below two encased primates. Across the way, there is a giant squid, a hairy anglerfish, porpoises, squirrels, snakes – all of which are soon to be put on the back of a lorry and sent 40 miles down the M4. They are among some 38 million artefacts to be relocated from their South Kensington home in the institution’s largest collections move since the 1880s: a £221m programme that will culminate at the Thames Valley Science Park (TVSP) in Shinfield, Reading, in 2031.

The project to shift over 40 per cent of its specimens was officially greenlit in March, while the NHM announced a further £20m in Government funding last week; a necessary move, explains Clare Valentine, who is leading the NHM Unlocked effort, because “we’ve basically run out of space.” While spillover collections are also stored in south London and Tring, many of the mothership’s buildings are now “beyond their useful life,” Valentine says. “We couldn’t build here” – a prior feasibility study projected a cost of £400m.

Not everyone is happy. In November, 23 scientists – including former staff – wrote a letter to the Times in response to the NHM’s collections exodus, concerned that splitting up collections would radically impact the research being carried out, and hamper the potential of future discoveries. Signed by curators from Australia and India, Germany, France and beyond, it decried the NHM as “leading the museum world in its loss of expertise,” noting that while employee numbers have doubled, those in charge of collections have dropped from 55 per cent to 15 per cent. In another article later that month, the institution’s culture was described as a “Stasi regime”.

Valentine, who joined the NHM 32 years ago, says “I don’t agree with that at all,” though concedes that “maybe I’m within the inner circle, as far as people would see it.” She admits that she was “surprised” by the letter, “and we were actually quite upset because several of those people know us. And none of them had actually spoken to us about our reasons for why we were doing it… [we were] annoyed, in a way, that we hadn’t had the opportunity to explain ourselves.”

The rift has exposed an unavoidable issue now facing all museums: space, and where to store the mounting swathes of history of which they are custodians. As collections grow and costs spiral, the tension between institutions’ role as tourist attractions and centres for furthering scientific research is rising.

A tortoise found by Charles Darwin in the Galapagos almost 200 years ago – Rii Schroer

One of the letter’s signatories, Richard Winterbottom, emeritus curator in the Department of Natural History at the Royal Ontario Museum, says this confluence of factors means “museums are in a lot of trouble”.

Winterbottom notes that in recent decades, there has been a shift towards enlisting slick directors with no research background (including one he calls “smooth as a suppository”) in order to drum up cash for “taxpayer-endowed Disneyworlds that have a little bit of truth and a little bit of insight, but not a hell of a lot. They’re all about entertainment and get[ting] the people through the doors, and I personally don’t see that as the function of an institution like a museum.”

The byproduct of that is vital areas of science – and the experts who study them – are being broken apart, says Fred Naggs, a former Mollusca Curator at the NHM, and now its chief antagonist. He describes its plan to relocate almost half of its artefacts away from its base as “a self-imposed act of institutional vandalism. It will mutilate a national treasure, not only inflicting a massive and permanent financial burden but also irrevocably damaging the Museum’s cultural identity and function,” he believes, as well as taking “away the critical mass of scientific functioning as an institution”. Naggs retired in 2016, but remained in an emeritus role until he began voicing his objections to the proposed move two years ago, at which point he says “they pulled the plug on me.”

Fred Naggs: the museum’s plans to relocate almost half of its artefacts away from its base ‘will mutilate a national treasure’ – Santi Rodriguez / Alamy Stock Photo

The NHM’s executive director of science, Tim Littlewood says that Naggs’s was an honorary position “which is subject to review every three years. In 2022, the decision was made not to renew Mr Fred Naggs’ appointment.” The outcome was “pretty much inevitable,” Naggs thinks. Still, “I felt compelled to speak out.”

Since the fallout, Naggs has begun writing a book, Death of the Natural History Museum: Dismembered, Stolen from the Nation, and Lost to the World. He has been buoyed a little by peers encouraging him to keep banging the drum, he says. Yet he has also been stung by the silence of many, who consider what happened to him “too high a price to pay.” That includes the unhappy former colleagues who describe the NHM as a Stasi regime – a fair description, Naggs says, as “the atmosphere at the NHM well-justifies such comments… Hidden from scrutiny and accountability, a small clique operating under government blessing has acted as it wishes.”

I put his allegations to Valentine in her office, which is filled with three decades of tchotchkes, books and files. She says it is unrealistic to expect that collections can stay here forever, not least given the limitations of being housed within a Grade I listed building. Littlewood says that while curator numbers have dropped, “the diversity of staff roles over time does not lessen our curatorial care”.

Clare Valentine, Head of Life Sciences Collections at the Natural History Museum – Rii Schroer

Seeing scientists from global institutions publicly denounce their move did give Valentine “a little bit” of pause, she admits. “But then knowing that places like the Smithsonian have done it, that Berlin are currently doing it, that Paris are doing it – all our peer institutions are in the same processes as ours,” she says, adding that she imagines similar controversy followed when the collections moved from Bloomsbury to South Kensington over 140 years ago. While there will inevitably be “a bit of inconvenience with having to move around, and wait[ing] a little bit longer for specimens,” that need not impact the quality of the science being done, Valentine says. “It’s just that the science will have to be done in a slightly different way.”

She adds that a benefit of NHM Unlocked is the hiring of new staff to digitise their collections – which, at prior staffing levels, would have taken 172 years to carry out. At present, just 0.5 per cent of the museum’s materials are currently on show (that figure is one per cent at the British Museum); the hope is that a better handle on what they have will enhance what can be displayed.

Its other function is to safeguard against an apparent rise in pilfered curios, in some cases the result of unwieldy and poorly documented collections. Last year, a curator at the British Museum stole up to 2,000 objects; 2,000 are missing from Wales’ national museums, with a further 500 taken from the Imperial War Museum. There are registers and paper ledgers for all items brought in pre-1990, after which things have been entered into a digital database; “that’s not going to happen in a flash. But what we’re making sure [of] is that to drawer level, certainly to container level, everything is recorded as well as we possibly can.”

Valentine is optimistic, in spite of the obstacles ahead, describing NHM Unlocked as “the master plan… What we’re doing now actually deals with, or should deal, with all our problems.” As far as storage concerns go, she may well be right. But when it comes to the wider battle brewing at museums the world over, resolution seems a long way off.

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