There are museums you visit once and quietly tick off, and there are museums you return to, not out of duty but delight. The Natural History Museum belongs firmly in the latter camp. More than a collection of bones and specimens, it is an architectural landmark, a civic gesture, and, above all, a place of wonder.

A cathedral in terracotta

Designed in the 1870s by Alfred Waterhouse, the museum’s Romanesque façade is carved from pale terracotta that gleams differently with every London sky. The detailing is exquisite: columns wrapped in botanical motifs, arches flanked by gargoyle-like animals, windows scaled with near-Gothic rhythm. To approach from Cromwell Road is to walk into a stage set — a building that is itself a specimen of Victorian confidence.

Inside, Hintze Hall strikes the tone: soaring arches, mosaic-tiled floors, and in the centre, Hope, a suspended blue whale skeleton that seems to swim through the air. Have you ever stood beneath 25 metres of life reduced to bone? It is humbling and oddly serene, a reminder that our species has always looked up in awe at what nature can achieve.

Collections that shape memory

The museum houses more than 80 million specimens, but its genius lies in how those are staged. The dinosaurs are the crowd-pullers, of course: an animatronic Tyrannosaurus that growls on cue, skeletons that anchor children’s memories for decades. In the Earth Hall, you step through a giant globe into a world of geology, gemstones glinting under glass, seismic simulators that rattle like London’s own Underground.

The quieter galleries are no less moving. Glass cases of butterflies, preserved in delicate arrays of colour; Charles Darwin’s own pigeon specimens; the gentle hush of the Cocoon, a spiralling white structure housing entomology collections. Each corner, whether bombastic or subtle, is a study in how to frame natural history as both science and theatre.

A living museum

Though entry is free, the museum never rests on its laurels. Temporary exhibitions bring urgency and relevance: a Wildlife Photographer of the Year show that has become a London institution, climate-focused installations that mix art and activism, digital exhibits that feel more Silicon Valley than South Ken.

And yet, despite the technology and ticketed blockbusters, the museum’s essence remains democratic. It belongs as much to a school trip from Hackney as to an international visitor squeezing it in between Harrods and Hyde Park. For Londoners, it is a place to return on a rainy afternoon, to walk familiar halls and still notice something new.