The Urban Nature Project, the Natural History Museum’s transformation of the five-acre open space in front of it, is a triumph of cultural and architectural multitasking. It educates, surprises and delights. It is a living laboratory for expert research. It makes scientific theory tangible and visible. It opens up a multilevel site to people in wheelchairs. It aims to handle large crowds effectively and with grace. It makes you see the London museum’s glorious Victorian building as never before. And it brings a new and improved version of its beloved diplodocus skeleton, icon of millions of childhoods, back to its South Kensington base.
The £25m project, supported by Amazon Web Services, the National Lottery Heritage Fund and several other sources, gains strength from its sense of purpose, which is to raise understanding of climate emergency. It aims to give physical shape to the perspective of time. It answers in three-dimensional and material form the ignorant cry that “climate has always been changing” – yes it has, but not at the speed it is now, except when a giant asteroid hit, or immense eruptions spewed destructive gases into the air.
