National Maritime Museum

The National Maritime Museum opened in 1937 in Greenwich, built around the Queen's House designed by Inigo Jones in the early 17th century and later Royal Hospital School buildings, to house Britain's national collection of maritime art, cartography, and navigational instruments. As the largest maritime museum in the world, its holdings exceed two million items, including Lord Nelson's Trafalgar coat, still bearing the bullet hole from the shot that killed him, alongside historic ship models, marine chronometers by John Harrison that solved the longitude problem, and one of the world's foremost collections of maritime art including works by Willem van de Velde. The museum's galleries are arranged thematically, covering exploration, trade, the transatlantic slave trade, polar expeditions, and the Royal Navy's role from the Tudor period to the present, rather than in strict chronological order. A glass-roofed courtyard, added in a 1999 refurbishment by architect Rick Mather, links the original wings and provides a light-filled central atrium. The building's original function as the Royal Hospital School is still evident in the layout of the west and east wings, which flank the Queen's House's classical symmetry. The museum sits within Maritime Greenwich, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, alongside the Cutty Sark, Royal Observatory, and Old Royal Naval College, and its collection developed from 19th-century naval and East India Company holdings combined with major bequests in the 1930s. Permanent galleries remain free, while temporary exhibitions on subjects such as Titanic or polar exploration are ticketed separately.