The Montagu House
The Montagu House
This was the site of the Montagu house, the property that acted as the first home of The British Museum’s collection. It was in this expansive mansion that John Keats and all contemporary visitors would have encountered the Elgin Marbles.
The land upon which the estate is located was sold to Ralph Montagu, the First Duke of Montagu, in 1675. He had this home designed by Robert Hooke. Construction of the estate began in 1677, with the mansion not fully complete until 1686, after a fire destroyed the original building and a new one had to be rebuilt. Upon the duke’s death in 1709, the building stood unoccupied before being obtained by the crown in June of 1754 as an estate in which to exhibit the newly assented British Museum collection. The Museum was opened to the public in 1759.
The Marbles in the Old Museum
The Elgin Marbles were sold to the British Museum in 1816, and so the Parthenon’s iconic structures joined the ranks of the museums impressively extensive collection.
The New British Museum
As the museum’s expanding collection proved the Montagu’s physical space to be inadequate housing, plans to demolish the building and construct a new museum were approved in 1823, with the construction of the museum we know today being completed in 1852. Its architectural style mimics the fashion of Ancient Grecian design, contributing to the debate of English/Greek appropriation and thievery. Despite where you stand on this geopolitical spectrum of museum ethics, it can not be denied that the Marbles and the exterior of the museum itself are stunning examples of human construction and expressions.
The Museum’s Legacy
The modern British Museum sits at the same site of the Montagu Home. Its collection is home to some of the most iconic artifacts in human memory from all over the world including the Rosetta Stone, the bust of Ramses the Great, and Hoa Hakananai’ from Easter Island. The museum was featured in the 2014 film Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, which I only mention as its plot also centers around the theme of returning home— in the film’s resolution, the Egyptian king Ahkmenrah, who has spent the last fifty years on display at the Museum of Natural History in New York City is gifted to the British Museum so that he may be laid to rest with his family, where he belongs. This demonstrates how modern museum professionals are conditioning themselves to think more critically and empathetically about repossession, returning, and reconciling past mistakes of thievery, oppression, and Western supremacy.
Content sourced from:
https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/montagu-house-first-british-museum
https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/14-things-not-miss-british-museum
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Coordinates
Longitude: -0.126982215734