Geological Museum

The Geological Museum was opened on the 3rd of July, 1935 as the new Museum of Practical Geology. Its opening coincided with the Centenary of the Geological Survey.

The new Museum of Practical geology, South Kensington. The diroamas are the cases between the pillars on the ground floor.

Geological dioramas at the Museum of Practical Geology, South Kensington, from 1932 - rescuing "a dull, even repellent, subject"

Extract from Flett, J.S. 1937. The first hundred years of the Geological Survey of Great Britain

Royal Commission and the plans for a new Museum at South Kensington

In July 1927 a Royal Commission was appointed to consider and report on the condition and organization of Government Museums and Galleries. The Chairman of this Commission was Viscount D’Abernon, and in November Sir John Flett, as Director of the Museum of Practical Geology, was called on to give evidence on the state of this Museum. The members of the Royal Commission lost no time in coming to a decision, and on 22nd December, 1927, it was stated in Parliament that on representations which a delegation of the Commission had made to the Chancellor of the Exchequer it had been decided to transfer the Geological Museum to an appropriate site in South Kensington as soon as financial circumstances permitted. The site which had been suggested by the Bell Committee in 1912 as most suitable for the new building was approved. The period of suspense was over.

The preparation of plans for the new building was undertaken by Sir Richard Allison and Mr. John H. Markham, Architects of H.M. Office of Works. Allison had much experience of museum construction, having been responsible for the plans of the new buildings of the Science Museum, and on his retirement Markham completed the design, and in his hands the form and details of construction took their final shape. The general plan does not differ much from that of the adjacent Science Museum, but an extensive suite of offices and laboratories was provided at the rear of the building for the staffs of the Survey and Museum. Sir Francis Grant Ogilvie, who, before taking up his duties as Principal Assistant Secretary of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, had been Director of the Science Museum and of the Royal Scottish Museum, constantly assisted with suggestions based on his long and varied experience in the design and construction of museums. The museum and library furniture, which was entirely new, as the fittings of the old Museum were unsuited and were in most cases useless, was designed by Mr. Allum and Mr. Buck of H.M. Office of Works.

The building was begun in 1929 and was practically completed early in 1933, when it was announced that H.M. Government had decided to convene an International Economic and Monetary Conference to meet in London during that summer. A search was made for a suitable building in which this important Conference could meet, and it was ascertained that the new Museum of Practical Geology was in all respects the most convenient and best adapted for the purpose. Fortunately, none of the special fittings required for the Geological Survey had yet been installed, and the building, though complete, was entirely empty. Very rapidly the interior was converted into conference halls, committee rooms, writing rooms, buffets, lounges, and in the basement accommodation was provided for the press, telephones, typists and messengers. The conference was opened by H.M. King George V. on 12th June, 1933, and was presided over by the Prime Minister, Mr. Ramsay MacDonald. The plenary sessions were finished in August and in October it was announced that if the Conference met again in London the new Museum would not be required for that purpose. The building was handed over to H.M. Office of Works to remove the fittings introduced for the Conference and to prepare for the reception of the Geological Survey.

During the year 1934 great activity prevailed both in the new and old Museums. The library, laboratories and collection rooms were fitted up with their cases, cabinets and racks of drawers, and most of the new furniture for the exhibition floors was delivered. Simultaneously, the collections in the old Museum were packed up by the staff and gradually transferred to South Kensington. The library at Jermyn Street was kept open as long as possible for the convenience of the public, but was finally closed at the end of July. It was installed in its new quarters and again made accessible to callers at South Kensington by the end of October. Over a million specimens, thirty-five thousand books and twenty thousand maps, besides manuscripts and documents, had to be dealt with in the course of the removal. On 31st October the old Museum was emptied and the keys handed back to H.M. Office of Works. The property was then placed on the market and after a time the Crown Lease was sold at £11,000 a year, a sum sufficient to pay interest on the cost of the new Museum and its fittings and provide a handsome surplus for H.M. Treasury. The cost of the Museum building was approximately £220,000, and of furniture and fittings £2,000. The staff of the Survey and Museum began to prepare the new Museum for the reception of the public. It was decided that the opening would take place in June or July, and the period of six months was all too short for the preparations.

In the interim the Curator of the Museum, Dr. W. F. P. McLintock, and the Assistant Curator, Dr. A. F. Hallimond, had not been idle. As soon as the main features of the new Museum had been decided on by the architect a general scheme of the displays which were to be exhibited to the public was drawn up and fully discussed. It was decided that the arrangement should be on the following lines

On the first floor or main floor all the exhibits should be of interest to visitors not skilled in geology. Such subjects should be illustrated as the action of wind, rain, rivers, weathering, ice, glaciers, volcanoes, earthquakes, also fresh water and marine deposits, the formation of rocks and their visible characters. In the centre of this floor it was decided to show a collection of precious stones, cut gems, ornamental stones and beautiful minerals both in their native state and cut and polished. The geology of London, the Thames Valley and the south-east of England, with the Hampshire Basin and the Isle of Wight, were to be exhibited with a full set of maps, photographs, diagrams, fossils, rocks, minerals and ores. Many explanatory labels, couched in the most simple terms, were prepared to accompany the specimens. A special feature of the exhibits on this floor was to be the presence of a number of dioramas, in natural colours and well illuminated, showing striking scenes of British geology such as the Needles (Isle of Wight), Lulworth Cove, Cheddar Caves, Edinburgh and the North-west Highlands.

On the second floor or first gallery the space was to be devoted to an exhibition of British Geology, based on the work of the Geological Survey. For convenience of preparation and description Great Britain was divided into provinces, each of which had a certain geographical and at the same time geological unity; for example, East Anglia, the Pennine Country, North Wales, Devon and Cornwall, the Southern Uplands, and the Northern Highlands of Scotland. One or two geologists who had a thorough knowledge of the district were put in charge of each of these areas with instructions to prepare a full series of exhibits with labels. A very large number of photographs was selected from the Survey’s collection to show the physical features of the country and to exemplify the close relation between geology and scenery. Many solid models were also constructed to show the geology and the surface relief. Of each district a descriptive handbook was to be published, written as simply as possible, to serve as a general account and as a handbook to the exhibits. On this floor also a suite of British fossils, stratigraphically arranged, and of rock-making minerals and typical rock structures, was to be exhibited.

On the third floor or second gallery there was to be an exhibition of applied or economic geology illustrating such subjects as building stones, slates, clays, cements, oil fields, iron ores and the principal ores of the metals (copper, tin, zinc, tungsten, gold, silver, etc.), and of the useful non-metallic minerals such as mica, asbestos, talc, magnesite, rock salt, gypsum, china clay, etc.

In this way it was hoped to provide something to interest the general visitor and at the same time to furnish all that was necessary for the student of British geology and the mining engineer or economic geologist who was specially interested in the application of geology to industry and commerce.

The topmost floor or third gallery was reserved for study and research collections, accommodated in cabinets of drawers. All the best material in the Survey collections, if not exhibited in the Museum, was placed in this gallery, divided into four series, rocks, minerals, fossil animals and fossil plants. For the collections there was plenty of room and excellent light, and space was also available for research workers and for the assistants engaged in the curation of the specimens. The public would be admitted to this gallery only when they desired to make a careful study of the research material in the possession of the Geological Survey.

The well-lighted and spacious basement of the Museum was assigned to workshops, store rooms, engineers’ equipment and in the centre a large apartment to hold half a million specimens in wooden, dust-proof drawers, sliding in steel racks.

Special attention was given to the provision of ample space for the library and map collections, which are much consulted not only by the staff but also by the public, and had been very unsatisfactorily housed in the old Museum.

One library was placed on the main floor for the use of the general visitors and another, more private, for staff and research workers. In the basement abundant storage was provided to take the accretions for many future years. The rearrangement, cataloguing and indexing of the library, when transferred to its new quarters, would be a task of considerable magnitude requiring many months of work.

The arrangements thus sketched out proved to be satisfactory on the whole, and needed no essential modification. The specimens for exhibit and for the reserve and study gallery were picked out and packed separately before they were sent to South Kensington, and as far as possible the collections, which were in a very dirty condition, were cleaned before packing. Twenty, or more, geologists of the field staff were detailed to prepare exhibits illustrating British Regional Geology in collaboration with the palaeontological and petrographical staffs. Descriptive labels were drafted and many sketch maps and coloured diagrams were executed by the draughtsmen to explain the exhibits. Nearly two thousand photographic enlargements from Survey negatives of British scenery were made, mounted and framed. Sixteen coloured dioramas of geological scenes were designed and constructed by professional scenic artists, and numerous solid models of interesting British geological districts such as Mull, Shropshire, the Weald of Kent and the Snowdon district of North Wales were made. These preparations involved an immense amount of work in which the field staff actively collaborated with the Museum staff and the petrologist and palaeontologists. By the end of June, after seven months of very arduous work, the new Museum was in such a state that it might be opened to the public, though, of course, much remained to be done before its condition could be regarded as likely to satisfy the critics.

Extract from E.B. Bailey. 1952. Geological Survey of Great Britain.

1920 Flett succeeds to Directorship - Geological Survey of Great Britain (by E.B. Bailey)

To South Kensington

In April, 1923, it was found that the roof of De la Beche's Museum of Practical Geology in Jermyn Street required repair. The damage was due to settlement of the foundations. It is quite possible that the trouble started with a German bomb, dropped near at hand in Piccadilly on the 19th October, 1917. Had not some plaster fallen from the roof, it might have escaped notice for some years to come. As it was, to quote from Flett's First Hundred Years of the Geological Survey: ' The Museum was at once closed to the public as dangerous, but the staff continued to work in it as usual.'

The Geological Survey Board, in view of all the circumstances, revived a recommendation that had been made by a Departmental Committee in 1912, and pressed for transfer of Survey Headquarters to South Kensington, where a site was available on land purchased from the proceeds of the 1851 Exhibition. Next year, 1924, the Government decided, at least in principle, to adopt this procedure.

As a temporary measure elaborate timber supports were erected in the Museum, and thin sheets of wood were inserted to replace glass in its one-time transparent roof. At last, on the 4th of August, 1925, the building was reopened to the public. To quote again from Flett 'The interior now presented a spectacle such as no other museum in the world could furnish.'

Meanwhile, plans were made for removal, in so far as this matter lay in the hands of the Survey. In 1925 Flett, accompanied by McLintock,. visited museums at Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm, Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Vienna, BudaPesth, Munich, Frankfurt on the Maine, Strasbourg, Brussels and Paris. They found that those which had been built as museums showed a progressive and advantageous development of plan. They were particularly impressed with the design and furniture of the Riksmuseum at Stockholm and the Deutsches Museum at Munich ; and generally speaking they learnt much of value regarding display, labelling, and illustration of exhibition material, and storage of reference specimens. All the recent museums had abundant ancillary accommodation for storage and research, including laboratories and libraries.

Financial stringency prevented the Office of Works from making any provision in their estimates for 1926-27, and again 1927-28, for the building of the proposed new Offices and Museum. It even came to be questioned whether the Survey required a museum of its own, since paleontology and mineralogy are principal features of the British Museum (Natural History) already at South Kensington. However, in July, 1927, a Royal Commission was appointed to consider and report on the condition and organisation of national museums in London and 'Edinburgh ; and in November it took evidence from Flett, who put forward the Survey case in cogent terms.

After this there was little delay. On the 22nd December the Under Secretary of State for the Home Office announced in the douse of Commons that the Royal Commission had advised the transfer of the Geological Museum to South Kensington at the earliest convenient moment, and that the Chancellor of the Exchequer hoped to give effect to this recommendation as soon as financial circumstances permitted. One last quotation from Flett: ' The period of suspense was over.'

Fortunately the financial difficulties of transferring the Survey from Jermyn Street to South Kensington, when properly faced, proved of much the same obliging character as those which have helped Columbia University in a succession of migrations from the centre of New York. The Government leased the Jermyn Street-Piccadilly site for £11,000 a year, which more than recoups it for the £245,000 expended on new buildings and furniture at South Kensington, on a site, it will be remembered, inherited from the 1851 Exhibition.

This site, situated on Exhibition Road, in what might fitly be called Princeconsortland, adjoins the British Museum (Natural History) on the west, and the Science Museum on the north ; while to the east it faces the Victoria and Albert Museum, north of which stand the Huxley Buildings, the first to be occupied of a great series housing the Imperial College of Science.

Plans for the new buildings were prepared by Sir Richard Allison and Mr. J. H. Markam, of H.M. Office of Works, and the furniture was designed by other officers of the same department. There was, of course, constant consultation, in which Flett and McLintock played a very prominent part, assisted by Grant Ogilvie. The latter had been successively Director of the Royal Scottish (Edinburgh) and Science (S. Kensington) Museums, before becoming Principal Assistant Secretary of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, and, concurrently until 1930, Chairman of the Geological Survey Board.

A start was made at actual building in 1929. By 1931 progress was such that several members of the field staff were diverted to co-operate with their museum colleagues in developing the exhibitional detail of the master plan, since successfully put into operation. According to this, the basement of the new Museum is devoted to workshops and storage; the main floor and two galleries to the display of exhibits (main floor to illustrate principles, first gallery, regions, and second gallery, economic resources); while the top floor, with a superficial area of 16,000 square feet, houses ' reserve and study collections,' and is furnished with tables for the benefit of research workers. Alongside, and with easy communications, stand the library, laboratories, and staff working rooms.

Flett arranged that the regional displays of the second gallery should be made the subject of eighteen Regional Guides illustrating the geology of the whole United Kingdom. The preparation of these Guides proved very stimulating to their selected authors; and their appearance has been welcomed by a wide public, much wider than that which has easy access to the Museum. The Guides rank, in fact, among the Survey's best-sellers.

Building proceeded so satisfactorily that the Summary of Progress for 1932 foretold a transfer to be completed in stages during 1933. The prophecy seemed safe, since it was penned in the early months of 1933. Suddenly, however, the Government installed an International Monetary and Economic Congress, thus delaying the entry of the Survey until the beginning of 1934.

On the 3rd of July, 1935, the new Museum of Practical Geology was opened to the public by a great-grandson of the Prince Consort, no less a person than H.R.H. the Duke of York, since crowned George VI. The ceremony was attended by over 1,200 guests.

In the evening of the same day the Geological Society held a reception of delegates and guests in its rooms at Burlington House in Piccadilly. The occasion was particularly happy, for the opening of the new Museum coincided with the Centenary of the Geological Survey. Next day this latter event provided the subject of a special assembly in the lecture theatre of the Royal Geographical Society at Kensington Gore. Lord Rutherford presided, as Chairman of the Advisory Council of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. He pointed to the large and representative gathering of scientists drawn from all parts of the world (some 130 from overseas); and found in it a striking testimony to widespread respect and admiration surrounding the British Geological Survey. He might, perhaps, have added affection, for the Survey, with all its faults, still occupies a warm corner in the heart of international Geology.

Flett entered into the spirit of the harvest thanksgiving, and furnished an appropriate resume of the long day's work. He was followed by speakers from abroad. Other festivities came later in the day.

After that, Museum and indoor functions were deserted in favour of the field. Three well attended excursions spent a week visiting South Wales, the Isle of Wight and Edinburgh, as the case might be.

Mention of Edinburgh recalls that Flett, in spite of his London preoccupations, succeeded in securing greatly improved Headquarters for Scotland in the form of a mansion in Grange Terrace, Edinburgh, which was occupied in 1927.

Quote from Bailey:

For my own part I never enter the extraordinarily successful new Museum of Practical Geology without a feeling of gratitude to Flett, to whom above all, with the whole-hearted support of his colleagues, the nation owes this great achievement. Very fittingly, having reached the goal of his latter years, he retired on the 3oth September, 1935. He had already been knighted ten years previously.