The Daily Telegraph - Features
‘It’s a self-imposed act of institutional vandalism’
The Natural History Museum’s plans to relocate 38 million specimens from its South Kensington home have sparked a backlash among scientists. Charlotte Lytton hears both sides of the debate
A fox stares out from a knee-height jar, limbs pressed to the glass, its fur a similar hue to the amber liquid it is engulfed in.
This is one of nearly 1,000 specimens in the “tank room” of the Natural History Museum (NHM) – a metre or so away from a tortoise found by Charles Darwin in the Galápagos Islands almost 200 years ago, and just below two encased primates. Across the way there is a giant squid, a hairy anglerfish, porpoises, squirrels, snakes – all of which are soon to be put on the back of a lorry and sent 40 miles down the M4.
They are among some 38 million artefacts to be relocated from their South Kensington home in the institution’s largest collections move since the 1880s: a £221million programme that will culminate at the Thames Valley Science Park (TVSP) in Shinfield, near Reading, Berkshire, in 2031.
The project to shift more than 40 per cent of its specimens was officially green-lit in March, while the NHM announced a further £20million in government funding last week; a necessary move, explains Clare Valentine, who is leading the museum’s “NHM Unlocked” effort, because “we’ve basically run out of space”.
While spillover collections are also stored in south London and Tring, Hertfordshire, many of the institution’s buildings in South Kensington are now “beyond their useful life”, Valentine says. “We couldn’t build here,” she adds – a feasibility study projected a cost of £400 million.
Not everyone is happy. In November, 23 scientists – including former staff – wrote a letter to The Times in response to the NHM’s collections exodus, concerned that splitting up holdings would radically affect the research being carried out, and hamper the potential of future discoveries. Signed by curators from Australia and India, Germany, France and beyond, it criticised the institution as “leading the museum world in its loss of expertise,” noting that while employee numbers have doubled, those in charge of collections have dropped from 55 per cent to 15 per cent. In another article later that month, the institution’s culture was described as a “Stasi regime”. Valentine, who joined the NHM 32 years ago, says, “I don’t agree with that at all”, though she concedes that “maybe I’m within the inner circle, as far as people would see it.” She admits that she was “surprised” by the letter, “and we were actually quite upset because several of those people know us. And none of them had actually spoken to us about our reasons for why we were doing it… [we were] annoyed, in a way, that we hadn’t had the opportunity to explain ourselves.”
The rift has exposed an unavoidable issue facing all museums: space, and where to store the swathes of history of which they are custodians. As collections grow and costs spiral, the tension between institutions’ roles as tourist attractions and centres for furthering scientific research is rising.
One of the letter’s signatories, Richard Winterbottom, emeritus curator in the department of natural history at the Royal Ontario Museum, says this confluence of factors means “museums are in a lot of trouble”.
He notes that in recent decades, there has been a shift towards enlisting slick directors with no research background in order to drum up cash for “taxpayerendowed Disney-worlds that have a little bit of truth and a little bit of insight, but not a hell of a lot. They’re all about entertainment and get[ting] the people through the doors, and I personally don’t see that as the function of an institution like a museum.”
The byproduct of that is vital areas of science – and the experts who study them – are
being broken up, says Fred Naggs, a former mollusca curator at the NHM, and now its chief antagonist. He describes its plan to relocate almost half of its artefacts away from its base as “a self-imposed act of institutional vandalism. It will mutilate a national treasure, not only inflicting a massive and permanent financial burden but also irrevocably damaging the museum’s cultural identity and function,” he believes, as well as taking “away the critical mass of scientific functioning as an institution”.
Naggs retired in 2016, but remained in an emeritus role until he began voicing his objections to the proposed move two years ago, at which point he says “they pulled the plug on me”.
Tim Littlewood, the NHM’s executive director of science, says that Naggs had an honorary position “which is subject to review every three years. In 2022, the decision was made not to renew Mr Naggs’s appointment.”
The outcome was “pretty much inevitable,” Naggs says. Still, “I felt compelled to speak out.”
Since the fallout, Naggs has begun writing a book, Death of the Natural History Museum: Dismembered, Stolen from the Nation, and Lost to the World. He has been buoyed a little by peers encouraging him to keep banging the drum, he says. Yet he has also been stung by the silence of many who consider what happened to him “too high a price to pay”. That includes the unhappy former colleagues who describe the NHM as a Stasi regime – a fair description, Naggs says, as “the atmosphere at the NHM well justifies such comments… Hidden from scrutiny and accountability, a small clique operating under government blessing has acted as it wishes.”
I put his allegations to Valentine in her office, which is filled with three decades of tchotchkes, books and files. She says it is unrealistic to expect that collections can stay here forever, not least given the limitations of being housed in a Grade I listed building. Littlewood says that while curator numbers have dropped, “the diversity of staff roles over time does not lessen our curatorial care”.
Seeing scientists from global institutions publicly denounce their move did give Valentine “a little bit” of pause, she says. “But then knowing that places like the Smithsonian have done it, that Berlin are currently doing it, that Paris are doing it – all our peer institutions are in the same processes as ours,” she says, adding that she imagines similar controversy followed when the collections moved from Bloomsbury to South Kensington more than 140 years ago. While there will inevitably be “a bit of inconvenience with having to move around, and wait[ing] a little bit longer for specimens”, that need not affect the quality of the science being done, Valentine says. “It’s just that the science will have to be done in a slightly different way.”
She adds that a benefit of NHM Unlocked is the hiring of new staff to digitise the collections – which, at past staffing levels, would have taken 172 years. At present, just 0.5 per cent of the museum’s materials are on show (that figure is 1 per cent at the British Museum); the hope is that a better handle on what they have will enhance what can be displayed.
Its other function is to safeguard against an apparent rise in pilfered curios, in some cases the result of unwieldy and poorly documented collections. Last year, a curator at the British Museum stole up to 2,000 objects. Another 2,000 are missing from national museums in Wales, with a further 500 taken from the Imperial War Museum. There are registers and paper ledgers for all items acquired before 1990, after which things have been entered into a digital database; “that’s not going to happen in a flash. But what we’re making sure [of ] is that to drawer level, certainly to container level, everything is recorded as well as we possibly can,” says Valentine.
She is optimistic, in spite of the obstacles ahead, describing NHM Unlocked as “the master plan… What we’re doing now actually deals with, or should deal with, all our problems.” As far as storage concerns go, she may well be right. But when it comes to the wider battle brewing at museums the world over, resolution seems a long way off.
‘It will mutilate a national treasure, irrevocably damaging its cultural identity and function’