Britain’s most frequently visited museum, the British Museum in London, is also its largest. It was founded in 1753 and is especially famous for its collection of antiquities and as the home, until the early 1990s, of the British Library. The oldest museum in Britain is the Ashmolean in Oxford, founded in 1683. It has collections of ancient history, fine art and archaeology. Many of the most important specialist museums, however, are in London. They include the museums built in South Kensington after the Great Exhibition of 1851: the Victoria and Albert Museum, which specializes in applied art, the Science Museum, especially popular with children and the Natural History Museum. Also in London are the Museum of London, illustrating the capital’s history, the Imperial War Museum and the London Transport Museum. One of the most recently founded museums is the Museum of the Moving Image, which specializes in the history of film and television.
Important art collections in London are those of the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery, next door to each other in Trafalgar Square, and the Tate Gallery, with its collections of British art and international modern art. Outside London, well-known museums and collections include the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the City Museum and Art Gallery in Birmingham, the City Art Gallery in Leeds, and the Yorvic Centre in York, a reconstruction of the city’s Viking settlement. Liverpool has the Tate Gallery of the North as an extension of the Tate Gallery in London, one of the finest in the country. Museums of specialist interest outside London incl ude the National Rail way Museum in York and the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford.
Scottish collections include those of the National Gallery of Scotland, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, which are all in Edinburgh. Glasgow has the important Burrell Collection, donated to the city in 1944 by the ship-owner and collector Sir William Burrell. Many famous museums began as private collections. The Ashmolean houses the collection donated to Oxford University by Elias Ashmole. The Tate opened in 1897 with the financial support of Sir Henry Tate. The Fitzwilliam was built to house the collection bequeathed to Cambridge University in 1816 by Viscount Fitzwilliam. Smaller museums in Britain include the town museums owned by many local councils, often showing collections of local history. The homes of famous people, especially writers, are often preserved as museums. One of the most frequen tl y visi ted is Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon. The homes of Jane Austen, Dickens, Wordsworth, Keats and Samuel Johnson are also preserved. Many of the newer museums are “living” museums that aim to recreate the lives of ordinary people or show how things were made in the past. An example of the latter is the Gladstone Pottery Museum near Stoke-on-Trent where potters can be seen at work in a Victorian Pottery.