7th June: Foundation of the British Museum

The British Museum was founded on this date in 1753. Here are some things you might not know about the British Museum:

1. The British Museum began with the legacy of a physician and naturalist called Sir Hans Sloane, who died in 1753. You could say Sloane was a bit of a hoarder. At the time of his death, he had collected about 71,000 objects including some 40,000 printed books, 7,000 manuscripts, natural history specimens including 337 volumes of dried plants, prints and drawings including those by Albrecht Dürer and antiquities from Sudan, Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Ancient Near and Far East and the Americas. Fond of his collection, Sloane didn't want his collection broken up, so he left the whole lot to King George II.
2. Quite possibly the king didn't really know what to do with all this stuff - but either he or his advisers came up with the idea of founding a museum that belonged to the nation. Included in the new museum was Sloane's collection and also the Cottonian Library and the Harleian library, and later in 1757 the Royal Library, assembled by various British monarchs.
3. The next decision to be made was where to put all the stuff, where it could be accessible to the public. The trustees chose a converted 17th-century mansion, Montagu House, which they bought from the Montagu family for £20,000. The short list of possible museum sites also included some other now famous London landmarks: the Palace of Westminster and Buckingham House, now Buckingham Palace.
4. It wasn't long before Montagu House became woefully inadequate to house the continually growing collection. The original house was demolished and extensions built. 69 surrounding houses were purchased and demolished to make room for more museum buildings. Today, the size of the building is 75,000 m2, the equivalent of 9 Football pitches. Significant amount of the original collections have been moved to the British Library and the National Gallery.
5. Today, the British Museum's collection numbers over 8 million objects. Only 1% of these are ever on display at any one time. Over 3,000 items are lent to other museums each year - over 1,500 to UK museums and museums abroad respectively.
6. The oldest object in the collection is a stone chopping tool which is nearly 2 million years old.
7. 6.7 million people visited the Museum in 2013, making it the most successful year in its history. The most successful temporary exhibition ever was Treasures of Tutenkhamen in 1972, attracting 1,694,117 visitors.
8. Controversy has raged for years about the Elgin Marbles, a collection of marble statues acquired by Lord Elgin from the Parthenon in Athens in 1806. Greece wants them back, arguing that they were virtually stolen by the British and should be in Greece, not England. The Elgin Marbles are not the only items the Museum has been criticised for hanging on to. There are several others, including the Benin Bronzes and the Rosetta Stone. Lord Elgin maintained that if he hadn't removed the Marbles from the Parthenon, the Ottomans would use them for target practice, so nobody would be able to enjoy them. The Museum maintains that if every artefact was returned to its native country, not only would the British Museum be emptied out, but so would many other museums around the world. There has been one exception - the Tasmanian Ashes, Aboriginal human remains, were returned to Tasmania.
9. The Museum is funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. A board of 25 trustees is responsible for the general management and control of the Museum. The current Director is Neil MacGregor.
10. In 2005, a hoaxer pulled the wool over the eyes of museum staff and convinced them to display what appeared to be a cave painting of a primitive man pushing a shopping trolley. It was a couple of days before they realised they'd been had and took the picture down. The hoaxer went on to become very famous as Banksy.