Horniman to reopen natural history gallery next year
The Horniman Museum & Gardens' £12.5m Nature + Love redevelopment will culminate early next year with the reopening of its natural history gallery - reports the Museums Association.
The Nature Gallery will open to the public from 5 February 2027, showcasing more than 2,300 objects, from the museum’s famous stuffed walrus to a new display about plastic pollution co-created with children from a local school.
A hands-on Nature Discovery Den next door to the gallery will enable families to engage with local south London wildlife.
The Grade II-listed gallery has undergone renovation to preserve its historic display cases and architectural features, and marks the final part of the Nature + Love redevelopment. In spring 2026, the Horniman opened Kusuma Nature Play featuring a free permanent outdoor play area, a family-friendly garden cafe, and new garden areas.
That project coincided with the museum celebrating its 125th birthday in 2026. Nature + Love emerged from the Horniman’s 2019 framework plan, which identified the need to redisplay its natural history collections and make better use of its outdoor spaces.
“Humankind’s impact on the planet has never been more obvious,” said Gordon Seabright, the Horniman’s chief executive. “We hope that through our ambitious Nature + Love project and the opening of the Nature Gallery we can help to foster a love of the living world and a sense that we can all play our parts in protecting it.
“We can’t wait for these new spaces to be open so we can welcome everyone to share the wonder and beauty of nature through fun and inspiring encounters here at the Horniman.”
The Nature + Love project was funded through National Lottery Heritage Fund grants, as well as £1.4m from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport’s Public Bodies Infrastructure Fund. Other support came from the Wolfson Foundation, Kusuma Trust, Garfield Weston Foundation and the Foyle Foundation.
The museum has an active crowdfunding campaign aiming to raise £30,000 towards the redevelopment of the gallery. People who contribute before 29 October can access rewards such as behind-the-scenes tours and limited edition prints.
Future cities forum reports that museums around the world have been upgrading their buildings to meet net zero targets while trying to preserve their collections for the next generation.
The Director of the Horniman Museum in south London, Gordon Seabright, joined Gavin Miller of MICA Architects and other contributors at our 'Cultural Cities' discussion event, hosted by Historic Royal Palaces at the Tower of London in May to talk about meeting the needs of new more diverse audiences, protecting collections and expanding museum facilities.
The Horniman Museum has installed 30 solar panels on the roof of the building, which will help power a new gallery. The panels cover an area more than twice the size of the mosaic at the front of the Museum and will help save 4.1 tonnes of CO2e/year – roughly equivalent it says to the emissions generated from driving from London to Cape Town and back – and about £3,000 per year in electricity costs. The historic masonry has been repaired and the gallery’s decorative brickwork has been restored. The scaffolding was then taken down in March 2026. There have been renovations to the historic glasshouse and a new cafe has been built.
Gordon told the forum:
'One of my many past jobs was that I ran the Eden Project, and so became really interested in the environmental aspect of attractions but also the storytelling aspect of that. So there's two aspects to what you say and one around storytelling is about our responsibility you know on how we serve, while we're a global museum, a mid-sized global museum, how we serve primarily four of the poorest boroughs of London.
'We have a responsibility to give people a sense of agency when it comes to the climate crisis and we can do that through storytelling in part about how insanely hard it is to make a Victorian museum carbon neutral. The irony being that the Victorian bits are the easiest bits because it's the modern buildings that are most rubbish. We've got that responsibility but then we've also got a responsibility to do it.
'I think we can get there, I think we can get to net zero, we are publicly saying we'll be there by 2040, I think we'll get there by 2035, but that is somewhat government dependent because the last bit, the last we've got a path that gets us there and the last bit depends on the UK's electricity supply being decarbonised and current government policy is going that way.
'But what we had to do was sort of chop the job into bits and figure out how do you get there. I guess in the last year we've knocked 20% of our energy use and that's primarily through a buildings management system that's a bit more clever than what we had before. Solar a little bit, maybe 3% of it that but the main deal is being a bit cleverer about it and then we've got the next big chunk will be taking the two newest and worst buildings and decarbonizing them so that by 2029 maybe 2028 we've got no gas power
'I mean the worst is the butterfly house.... on the top of the hill there's like a greenhouse with a tropical environment inside with the butterflies living there but it's a single skin glasshouse and it's gas-powered so that's insane. Just sort that and that's 14% of our problem gone away. So we kind of know the way there and we can tell the stories to our visitors about how hard that is and at the same time we like to tell the story about water use because you know we get through about almost 10 million cubic meters of water a year and most of that is in the loos and that's terrible.'
Gordon was asked how some of the stories about the objects have changed over time:
'There's a garden story, because the ornaments at the museum were set in the 1680s gardens, so there's a garden story which is around changing the planting so that we have drought-resistant plants. There's an aquarium story, because we've got an aquarium in the basement, and we have to make salt water for that, and that was all being flushed away, and so now we've learned how to desalinate the wastewater and use it to water the gardens and flush the loos, but then there's also the story about what we do in terms of serving the community with a museum that is about the stuff that matters to them. And you're quite right, we've had to close, I mean we've still got the Natural History Gallery closed for another year or so, because most of the interpretation hadn't been touched for as long as 60 years. It was very colonial, and it didn't mention climate change.'
Some of the objects from Ukraine through research have turned out to be completely different to how they were described originally and Gordon commented:
'That's been fascinating. So we've got about 350,000 bits of stuff. We're an object-based museum, we think there's a magic in objects, so you'd better be able to tell the right story about those. And it has intrigued me how much there is to learn about that and it's a theme we've done in the last year.
'This time last year I was in Kyiv working with some Ukrainian museum people, so we've made friends with them and they helped us then to look at the objects in our collection from Ukraine and figure out what they really are because they were, as it turns out, they were mostly collected in the 1940s and 50s, and reading the explanations of what they are they were probably interpreted by a curator who was was more Polish than Ukrainian.
'Basically, the interpretation was just plain wrong. And so one of the things we may be able to do is tell the true stories of those objects, because our Ukrainian friends have helped us do that, and put things on display with what was our first trilingual exhibition, actually, in English, Ukrainian, and Crimean Tatar. There's not a huge Crimean Tatar community in London, but those that there are were able to see their stuff interpreted for them.'
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