The British Museum, behind its purposeful and orderly front, gets more and more complicated the deeper in you go. It has grand spaces – the white stone and shadowless light of the Norman Foster-designed Great Court, the classical halls designed by its original architect Robert Smirke to display statues of Pharaonic scale, and the Parthenon-sized Duveen Gallery, built in the 1930s to house the marble sculptures from the famous temple. Beyond and between them is a tissue of spaces and passages, hard to navigate, like the back corridors and lumber rooms of a stately home, in which exquisite vases and reliefs languish in dim cases and on dull walls, over floors tiled in the bureaucratic beige of a 1970s revamp.
Overhead there’s a hodgepodge of skylights and valley gutters, accreted over time, prone to leaks, which doesn’t strengthen the museum’s case when they resist calls to repatriate those marbles, and other exhibits acquired by dubious means. Heating and ventilation systems are antiquated. For all of which reasons the museum would very much like to renew and partly rebuild the Western Range, which houses some of its most famous objects and accounts for 35% of its total area.
