British Museum

The British Museum in Bloomsbury, London, is the world's first public national museum, founded in 1753 and opened to the public in 1759. Its collection of over eight million objects represents two million years of human civilisation across every inhabited continent. The building is a Greek Revival structure, but the architectural centrepiece is the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court — a glass-and-steel roof canopy designed by Norman Foster and opened in 2000, enclosing the museum's central courtyard and forming the largest covered public square in Europe. At the heart of the Great Court stands the cylindrical Reading Room where Karl Marx, Darwin, and Dickens once worked. The Egyptian galleries draw the largest crowds; Room 4 contains the Rosetta Stone, a 196 BC decree inscribed in three scripts and the key to deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, and is the single most-visited object in the museum. Room 18 displays the carved frieze panels from the Parthenon (the Elgin Marbles), representing the most significant pieces of ancient Greek sculpture outside Athens. Room 41 houses the Sutton Hoo helmet from 7th-century Anglo-Saxon East Anglia and the Lewis Chessmen, 12th-century Norse ivory pieces discovered on the Isle of Lewis. The Lindisfarne Gospels, an illuminated manuscript produced in Northumbria around AD 715, occupies the Sir John Ritblat Sainsbury Gallery. Visitors with limited time should select three or four rooms rather than attempting to see the full collection in a day.