Planning a visit to the Grant Museum of Zoology? Here’s what you need to know before you go.
Get ready to discover the Grant Museum of Zoology, where rare species, brains and giant elk antlers live.
You’ll have heard of University College London before, no doubt, but did you know there’s a natural history museum tucked inside it, packed with some of the weirdest and most interesting exhibits in the city?
The Grant Museum of Zoology is housed in the Rockefeller Building at UCL and has been around since 1828, founded by Robert Edmond Grant, be prepared to uncover some of London’s creepiest and strangest artefacts.
It opened its doors to the public in 1996 and has held events and exhibitions throughout, alongside its weird permanent collection. This year, it’s also part of Two Centuries Here, UCL’s campus-wide bicentenary exhibition.
Ready to uncover London’s weirdest museum?
What is the Grant Museum of Zoology, and why should I visit?
The Grant Museum of Zoology is home to an intriguing collection of around 68,000 specimens and preserved animals spanning more than 200 years, sounds cool, right?
The other thing to know about this peculiar museum is that exhibits aren’t perfectly placed like you’d normally expect. Instead, as many specimens as possible are crammed into dozens of glass cases and piled high. The space is very small and compact, considering how many unique specimens there are.
There’s plenty to learn at this London zoology museum, so pay close attention to the remains of several extinct species.
Keep your eyes peeled for the skeleton of the extinct South African zebra known as the quagga, you really do learn something new every day. The last quagga died in 1883, and this museum houses one of only seven skeletons in existence, you won’t want to miss the rarest specimen in the world.
What weird exhibits will I see?
The specimens only get stranger from here. Look for the thylacine, what’s that, you ask? It’s a Tasmanian tiger, a dog-like creature that’s been extinct since the 1930s. There’s also the bones of a dodo, a flightless bird last sighted in 1662.
The fun continues with the 99-inch-wide antlers of a giant elk. When Grant once visited an Irish pub, he spotted them mounted on a wall and offered to buy them, he was always on the lookout for new and interesting artefacts to add to the museum.
The Blaschka collection is an array of glass models of jellyfish, sea anemones, gastropods, sea cucumbers and cephalopods. It’s extremely difficult to preserve the soft bodies of marine invertebrates, so Leopold Blaschka and his son made these incredibly cool, downright weird glass models that look distinctly like the real thing.
The Micrarium
Don’t leave without finding the Micrarium, a converted office space transformed into a beautiful backlit cave, its walls lined floor to ceiling with over 2,000 microscope slides. It’s a genuine change of pace after the bones and jars elsewhere in the museum, tiny specimens most natural history museums never bother displaying, whole squid just a couple of millimetres long, beetles sliced along their entire length and a couple of microscopic slivers of genuinely giant animals, whale, mammoth and giraffe among them, hidden among the miniature creatures. It’s one of the more photogenic corners of the whole museum.
The famous mole jar
The museum’s most popular exhibit is a tightly packed jar full of moles, what?
Yes, you heard that right. There’s a large jar of whole preserved moles, eighteen to be exact. Be prepared for it to be one of the most bizarre things you’ve ever seen. Apparently this is the most efficient way to store such a large number of specimens, but why you’d want to do that in the first place is another question entirely.
It’s believed students may have used them for dissection during classes, or they may have belonged to a researcher studying mole anatomy, we’ll never know for sure.
Aside from perusing the exhibits with your mouth agape, the Grant Museum has some interactive features too. Attached to some displays, you’ll find iPads you can use to get involved in conversations about the role of science in society and how museums should be run.
The history of the Grant Museum of Zoology
The Grant Museum of Zoology is home to London’s quirkiest artefacts, founded in 1828 by Robert Edmond Grant, hence the name.
But why did Grant start a museum? It was first used as a teaching collection for UCL, he was, after all, the professor of zoology and comparative anatomy, and years earlier had mentored a young Charles Darwin, whose evolutionary ideas would go on to eclipse Grant’s own. Grant was best known during his time for his work on marine invertebrates, sponges, sea pens and molluscs in particular.
Aged 35, Edinburgh-born Grant moved down to London and accepted a teaching position at the University of London, staying there until his death in 1874. He was the first Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy in England.
When Grant first arrived at UCL, he found there were no teaching materials with which to teach his course, so he began collecting specimens, diagrams, lecture notes and dissection material, the basis of the museum today.
On his death in 1874, Grant was persuaded to leave his library and collection of specimens to UCL.
What is the museum like today?
The Grant Museum wasn’t always housed in the Rockefeller Building, it has a colourful past. The museum has survived wartime bombing, multiple ceiling collapses, flooding and threats of closure. It found its current home in the Rockefeller Building in 2011, a building that used to be UCL’s Hospital Medical School.
Now occupying the school’s former library, the museum sits in a genuinely famous filming location too. It was used as a Gotham City courtroom in Batman Begins, directed by Christopher Nolan, himself a former UCL student, now you really have to visit.
Today, the zoology museum in London is a resource for university and school groups, who use the collection for teaching, as well as for artists and researchers. Grant would have loved that his collection is still being used to inspire a new generation.
The museum runs a lively events programme throughout the year, including special exhibitions, and it’s open to the public year-round. Its own collection also feeds into Two Centuries Here, UCL’s bicentenary exhibition running across the wider Bloomsbury campus until July 2027, alongside objects from the Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology and other UCL collections.
The London x London Take: most people do the main gallery and leave, don’t be most people, the Micrarium is easy to walk straight past if you’re not looking for it, and it’s genuinely one of the best small, strange things to see in London. If you’re free on an evening they’re running, the Grant Museum After Hours events (over-18s only, a glass of wine included) are a proper way to see a museum most people only ever visit in daylight.
Practical tips for visiting the Grant Museum of Zoology
- Tickets are free. The museum is open Tuesday to Friday from 1pm to 5pm, and on Saturdays from 11am to 5pm, closed Sunday and Monday.
- Address: Rockefeller Building, 21 University Street, London WC1E 6DE.
- The museum is located near Warren Street, Euston Square and Goodge Street stations, no more than ten minutes’ walk from any of them.
- Keep an eye out for Grant Museum After Hours, occasional evening openings for over-18s with a themed twist and a glass of wine included, check UCL’s events listings for upcoming dates.
