We are the
#1
indoor attraction in the UK
We were the UK's favourite indoor attraction for the second year in a row, welcoming more than 5.1 million visitors through our doors in South Kensington. The driving force behind this achievement was UK families, and we couldn't be more thankful for their support.
As well as providing a brilliant day out, we’re on a mission to create advocates for the planet. We want to inspire everyone who visits us with a love for nature and an admiration of science. We want to help people understand their place in the history, and the future, of life on Earth.
[Our success] is testament to our innovative and inspiring public programme of events and exhibitions… as well as the dedication of our visitor experience team who work so hard to ensure our visitors have a brilliant day out.
Dr Doug Gurr
Museum Director
5,157,405
visitors to South Kensington
↑ 196%
from last year
134,208
visitors to Tring
↑157%
from last year
3.3 million
domestic visitors in 2022
↑83%
from 2019
During its successful initial run at South Kensington, the Our Broken Planet exhibit drew in more than a million visitors. The exhibit featured more than 40 specimens, exploring the human impact on our planet. They covered a wide range of issues, from deep-sea mining to fast fashion. What's more, 76% of visitors who attended the exhibit agreed that their visit had made them more likely to take action to protect the natural world.
We're expanding on the exhibit with a series of free art displays exploring the planetary emergency, starting with The Lost Rhino by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg. We've also installed pop-up exhibitions in our permanent galleries that tell stories from Our Broken Planet. There’s plenty more in store, including a podcast, gallery and touring package.
76% of visitors who attended the exhibit agreed that their visit had made them more likely to take action to protect the natural world.
More than a million people welcomed home the nation’s favourite dinosaur this year following a whirlwind tour of the UK beginning in 2017. Supported by the Garfield Weston Foundation, the tour reportedly saw a ‘Dippy effect’ wherever it went, with a record-breaking two million visitors and just under £36 million of economic benefit across the eight locations. Now Dippy has moved on once more to a new home in Coventry on a three-year loan.
One of our top priorities is making sure the treasures in our collection are able to be enjoyed by as many people as possible while benefitting and inspiring communities across the UK.
Dr Doug Gurr,
Museum Director
In March 2023, a life-sized cast of Patagotitan mayorum went on display in South Kensington. It’s the first time this gentle giant has set foot in Europe. At four times heavier than Dippy the Diplodocus and 12 metres longer than Hope the blue whale, it’s a truly spectacular sight.
At our exhibition Titanosaur: Life as the Biggest Dinosaur, visitors come face-to-face with this giant and learn how a creature of this colossal size could have survived and thrived on Earth. The exhibition also highlights the need to care for the planet's largest and most vulnerable creatures today.
With special thanks to our dinosaur wrangling partners:
Apple TV+
The Apple Original series Prehistoric Planet invites viewers to experience the wonders of these extraordinary creatures like never before.
IAG Cargo
IAG Cargo is the Exhibition Logistics Partner for our titanosaur exhibition. IAG Cargo transported the cast of Patagotitan mayorum from Argentina to Europe for the first time.
The fifty-eighth edition of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year opened with a fresh new look. The WPY Horizons initiative is helping to diversify entrants, so as to better showcase the talents of photographers from the global south, as well as women and nonbinary photographers.
We also partnered with Young Minds for a Compassionate World to provide training to a group of young aspiring photographers from India. Through this work, we hope to inspire a new generation of photographers who will tell locally rooted stories of our planet with empathy and creativity.
We are grateful to global green energy company Ørsted for its continued support for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition for the ninth year running.
We described
350+
new species
We digitised
361,000
specimens this year…
…making
5.5 million
specimens in total so far
We published
718
scientific papers
A study of four species of UK bumblebee held in museum collections, found that these insects are increasingly stressed due to environmental change. By using wing symmetry as a proxy for stress, scientists were able to draw on extensive museum collections to see how stress levels have changed over time and how things might change in the future. Before this, studies only analysed living insects, and so could only get a snapshot of the issue.
Another study used our digitised butterfly collection combined with machine learning to look at how temperature fluctuations impact butterfly body size and how that might affect their ability to breed.
This research is one of the first to demonstrate that computer vision - getting computer programs to identify objects and people - can accurately assess data from digital collections. It highlights the immense value of digitising the natural history specimens held in some of the world’s largest museum collections.
Professor Anjali Goswami and her team at the Museum created a new model of mammal evolution by studying a collection of skulls. They used 3D scans of 322 specimens to shed light on theevolution of mammals in the aftermath of the extinction of the dinosaurs and how it has influenced life on Earth today.
The research was only made possible because new techniques enable us to analyse specimens that have been in our collections for hundreds of years. The new data it has provided could help predict how species will respond to rapid changes in their environment.
These methods could be truly transformative for the future of natural history research, as they offer new ways to understand evolution and extinction. There’s also scope to see how we can use this knowledge to tackle the planetary emergency on a global scale.
This research will transform how we understand the incredible radiation of placental mammals, a group that includes our own species, and how that critical period after the last mass extinction 66 million years ago has shaped evolution ever since.
Professor Anjali Goswami
Alongside physical changes, we can also gain valuable insights into the history - and the future - of insects by looking at their genes. Extracting the genetic code from the remains of long dead animals was once the stuff of science fiction. Today, it’s not only possible, but we can even use fragments of DNA preserved in sediment layers to build a picture of whole ancient ecosystems.
Compared to larger animals, studying smaller creatures such as insects presents unique challenges, but could unlock new ways for researchers to use the extensive insect specimens held in museum collections.
Despite the challenges, our researcher Dr Selina Brace and colleagues were able to successfully extract the genomes of bumblebees from different museum collections. The study, published in Methods in Ecology & Evolution, sheds light on how DNA degrades over time and how it can be reconstructed to gain insights into the past.
'This study is one of the first to look at the DNA of a large number of insect specimens across different museums,' Selina explains. 'It’s really important to have been able to understand how that DNA is preserved.'
With this vast resource at their fingertips, our researchers could build a detailed picture of how past environmental shifts have impacted insect populations over thousands of years and through this better predict their responses to current and future threats.
Our touring exhibitions
were seen by
1.7 million people
across 11 countries
We shared evidence at
two
climate and biodiversity COPs
6.5 million+ people
read Discover, our online magazine, with
68% of readers
from outside the UK
Our delegation attended the COP15 global biodiversity conference in Montreal. The goal was to advocate for scientifically rigorous and usable indicators in how we track biodiversity loss. Without these inidicators, biodiversity policy failures are likely to be repeated.
One such indicator, our Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII), measures how much of a region's natural biodiversity remains. The BII was discussed at the highest levels and is now accessible through a digital tool that allows negotiators and policymakers to track changes between countries since 2000.
The BII was also used to create a provocative artwork by Thijs Biersteker called Econario - a 5-metre-tall robotic plant that grew and withered depending on the impact of decisions made at COP15. The aim was to show the impact of current environmental choices on our planet’s future.
Along with the UK’s Department for Education, the Royal Horticultural Society and the Royal Society, we are creating a National Education Nature Park and awards scheme for every school in England. The goal is to inspire young people to connect with nature, understand biodiversity and climate resilience and feel confident to take action.
The scheme will help students turn the green spaces at their schools into their own nature parks, creating a network of educational outdoor areas managed by the students themselves. They will be able to gain valuable knowledge and leadership skills while contributing to biodiversity and climate resilience in their local communities.
We’re committed to ensuring nature and science is accessible to all and to continuing to work closely with our local communities. We will be building on our outreach work, which last year engaged 1,500 local children and young people in a range of activities, such as our dedicated winter community space, career inspiration events and skills-building projects.
Alex Burch
Director of Public Programmes
Our Explorers Programme is encouraging more young people from marginalised backgrounds in the UK to study science subjects and pursue careers in museums and natural history, specifically in Earth, Environmental and Ecological Sciences.
Our first Explorers Conference was an opportunity for attendees to learn about career opportunities first hand from successful scientists from similar backgrounds, participate in workshops and network with speakers and peers.
Volunteers are vital to our work, with more than 500 currently generously donating their time to engage with our visitors and support our scientists and collections. We offer a range of exciting volunteer, internship and work experience opportunities, all designed to benefit participants as much as they benefit us. Each one, whether it’s public facing or behind the scenes, provides enriching and inspiring experiences for both our volunteers and our visitors.
We recently contributed to a ground-breaking paper in Science, which highlights the unparalleled insight into life on Earth that collections like ours can provide. Despite this much of the information contained within them is currently inaccessible.
The paper proposes a database to access natural history collections around the world and emphasises the leading role that natural history museums can play. This could enable more strategic and equitable use of collections, especially in the fight against climate change.
So far we have digitised more than 5.5 million specimens - an astonishing number, and yet only about 7% of the total collection. This new paper reinforces our goal to speed up our digitisation programme and make vital natural history data widely accessible around the world.
We partnered with Universal to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the release of the iconic film Jurassic Park, which spawned a generation of dinosaur lovers. To celebrate, we co-created a nostalgic Jurassic Park pop-up shop, offering a range of merchandise and decorated with life-size animatronic models to inspire the next wave of dino enthusiasts.
A big thank you to all our Members, Patrons, Corporate Supporters, individuals and funders who have been with us on the journey to a future where both people and planet thrive. Everything we achieve is only possible through your support.
