Natural History Museum, London

Natural History Museum, London is presented as both a cathedral of natural history and a working archive of animal life. Its whale displays make immense creatures visible to the public, but the building also preserves specimens in restricted collections and records the difficult processes by which animals were prepared for display. The history of its Whale Hall shows this double purpose at work: an effort to represent whales as living forms became a monumental model, while the museum’s collections preserve both scientific evidence and reminders of the violence that brought some specimens to human attention.

Setting and public encounter

The museum announces its scale before visitors reach its exhibits. Its terracotta façade resembles geological strata and bears an elaborate bestiary of griffins, medieval fish, and pterodactyls. Inside the gothic nave, a blackened diplodocus occupies the space, while the route through the galleries passes fossil marine reptiles and displays of land animals. The architecture turns natural history into a procession through vanished worlds, culminating in the whale as an object at once zoological and almost mythical.

A sperm-whale skeleton once stood in the nave. A century earlier, it was guarded by a figure who appeared to be a Victorian policeman, making the animal seem less like a specimen than a prisoner. The contrast between this older display and the present Whale Hall is significant: the whale remains an imposing presence, but the institution’s modes of presentation change, as do the meanings attached to it. The museum does not simply contain natural objects; its rooms and arrangements direct visitors’ attention and shape their sense of what those objects are.

The Whale Hall and its blue whale

The idea of a new Whale Hall had been proposed as early as 1914, but war halted the project. In 1923, the museum’s director, Sidney Harmer, drew the Trustees’ attention to the inadequacy of the existing displays of large whales. He argued that visitors should be able to understand the appearance of the Greenland whale, blue whale, and humpback, and invoked the institution’s expressed sympathy for efforts to protect whales from extinction. The hall also had a research context: its principal purpose was to promote the work of the Discovery expeditions in South Georgia, where scientists investigated whales alongside the British whaling fleet in the Southern Ocean.

Harmer’s proposal took years to become a building. The new hall was announced in June 1929, with a glass roof supported by steel girders in a Modernist style, and was completed in 1931. A life-size whale was planned as its centrepiece. In 1933, the museum considered commissioning a Norwegian engineer to obtain a blue whale, suspend it by its tail in an engraving dock, and make a mould. Selling the blubber and models made from that mould was meant to offset the expense, but the experimental nature of the scheme led to its abandonment.

In April 1937, the museum’s technical assistant and taxidermist, Percy Stammwitz, proposed making the whale inside the hall instead. He and his son Stuart spent nearly two years constructing it, using measurements taken by scientists in South Georgia. They cut transverse wooden sections from giant paper patterns, joined them with slats spaced three feet apart, and covered the frame with wire netting and plaster. Stuart painted the eye. During construction, workers used the hollow interior as a canteen, an everyday use that sits strikingly beside the model’s eventual monumental role.

The resulting blue whale hangs in a gallery large enough to resemble an aircraft hangar. Nearly one hundred feet long, from its nose to its twenty-foot flukes, it is the museum’s largest object. Yet it is not a preserved skeleton or a faithful cast of an entire living whale. Built in the 1930s, before anyone had seen a whole whale alive in its element, the model relied on carcasses hauled from the water. Those bodies had deflated, so the reconstruction carries the limits of the evidence from which it was made. The whale is hollow, formed from plaster and chicken wire over a wooden frame built on site. Its scale inspires wonder; its materials and history make that wonder inseparable from approximation.

Collections behind the galleries

The public displays are only one layer of the museum. Below the Whale Hall, the curator of sea mammals, Richard Sabin, takes visitors through automatic doors into climate-controlled rooms lined with tall grey lockers. Inside are cetacean specimens preserved in alcohol and identified by Latin names. One small container holds a humpback fetus, its open mouth and pale skin giving it the uncanny appearance of a toy. Labels, containers, and controlled conditions turn individual bodies into specimens available for study, while retaining their visible material presence.

Further inside, shelves hold animals suspended in jars of pale brown liquid. The collection includes a spiny anteater, a severed shark’s head, and a coelacanth; nearby, metal vats bear labels indicating that whole dolphins and infant whales are stored within. The movement from public gallery to locked store changes the visitor’s relation to the exhibits. The animal that appears as a composed image in a hall reappears here as preserved tissue, a classified body, or a concealed specimen whose contents are announced only by a label.

The largest of these displays in storage is a plate-glass tank containing Architeuthis dux, the giant squid and a legendary opponent of the sperm whale. Twenty-eight feet long, the specimen was hauled up by Falklands fishermen in the Southern Ocean, frozen, and shipped to Hull before reaching the museum’s cellars in South Kensington. Its faint green appearance in preservation differs sharply from the reddish animal it had been in life. Nearby, jars contain squid flesh and beaks recovered from a sperm whale’s stomach by the Discovery expedition. In this arrangement, predator and prey are both made available to scientific inspection: the whale’s feeding is documented through the remains of the animal it consumed.

Display, preservation, and the history of whales

The museum’s exhibits also expose the labour and decay behind natural-history display. Before the war, specimens were prepared in pits of silver sand on the museum grounds. Rainwater percolated through the sand to speed decomposition, a process that could take two years or more; photographs show sperm whales hauled out of what resembled an animal dry dock. The practice ended after local residents complained about the smell. The picturesque image of a whale suspended in a bright hall therefore has a less visible counterpart: carcasses decomposing behind the museum’s gothic façade, tended by workers until bones could be articulated and displayed.

The blue whale model’s grandeur and the cellar’s preserved bodies hold different kinds of knowledge, neither complete on its own. The model gives visitors a sense of an animal’s scale but records the limitations of a period when living whales had not been seen whole in their natural setting. The collections preserve physical evidence, but their classification and presentation also determine how that evidence is encountered. Across the museum, whales appear as objects of research, public spectacle, historical memory, and human use. That tension gives the institution its significance in the book: it makes whales visible while showing how much of the living animal remains beyond the reach of models, labels, and preserved remains.