British Museum
The British Museum is one of the great museums of the world. With more than 70,000 exhibits ranged over several miles of galleries, it boasts a huge collection of antiquities, prints and drawings – more than 13 million objects (and growing).
The
building itself, begun in 1823, is the grandest of London’s Greek
Revival edifices, dominated by the giant Ionian colonnade and portico
that forms the main entrance. At the heart of the museum is the Great Court, with its remarkable, curving glass-and-steel roof, designed by Norman Foster. At the centre stands the copper-domed former Round Reading Room, built in the 1850s to house the British Library. It was here, reputedly at desk O7, that Karl Marx penned Das Kapital