The museums of UCL

University College London, whose main campus is clustered between Euston station and the British Museum, is home to several excellent museums.

The Grant Museum of Zoology is crammed into a single wood-panelled room, densely packed from floor to ceiling with cabinets full of specimens. Established by Robert Edmond Grant in 1828, it feels like a transitional moment between the “cabinets of curiosities” of early collectors and the more rigorously ordered later museums of natural history.

The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology houses the university’s collection of over 80,000 ancient Egyptian artefacts. The collection grew out of the initial donation from the Victorian writer Amelia Edwards, and is named for its first curator, Flinders Petrie.