The Natural History Museum has welcomed more than 5 million visitors to its new gardens in the first year of opening, showing a demand for urban green spaces.
Reopened in July 2024 following a major transformation, the new gardens span five acres around the museum’s South Kensington building.
They have been reimagined to provide an immersive experience that blends nature, learning and scientific research.
Highlights include Fern, a bronze cast of the museum’s iconic diplodocus, which greets visitors as they explore 540 million years of life on Earth.
Also, one of two living galleries, the Nature Discovery Garden, serves as a unique research hub, where the museum’s 400 scientists are working on urgent ecological challenges.
Here, biodiversity data is gathered via monitoring techniques like environmental DNA, acoustic recordings, and visual observations, which is all fed into an innovative data ecosystem.
Demand for urban green spaces
“We could not be more delighted with the success of our gardens, which have helped connect millions of people directly to nature and are already providing critical scientific data to aid our understanding of how to support urban wildlife,” said Doug Gurr, director of the Natural History Museum.
“The museum’s gardens are open year-round and are free to visit.”
As well as welcoming 5,050,000 visitors, the gardens have engaged close to 100,000 people in a programme that studies how noise pollution affects insects.
In addition, more than 40,000 people have taken part in family garden activities, exceeding the museum’s targets by 100 percent.
To celebrate the gardens’ first anniversary, the Natural History Museum hosted the family-friendly BioBlitz event for nature enthusiasts on 28 July.
During the BioBlitz, members of the public were invited to explore the gardens, identify local wildlife, and take part in scientific research.
Visitors used microscopes, pond dipping kits and hand lenses to help catalogue urban biodiversity.
Images courtesy of the Natural History Museum
