Park of the week

192. Natural History Museum Gardens

In July 2024, two new gardens opened on either side of the main entrance of the Natural History Museum on Cromwell Road, replacing plain lawns and serving as “outdoor galleries”. Their opening was part of the Urban Nature Project, the Museum’s response to the pressures of urbanisation, climate change and biodiversity loss. They’ve added five acres of green space in the process.

Each garden has a different purpose. The one on the right, as you look at the front of the Museum, is the Evolution Garden, designed to tell the story of life on Earth. The rocks, pants and sculptures represent what was happening at a particular time from the 2.7 billion years ago to the present day, geological era by era. There’s an ammonite pavement, featuring fossilised sections of former seabed, from Lyme Regis.

The fossil tree is 330 million years old, predating the time of the dinosaurs. It lived during the Earth’s Carboniferous period, growing in Scotland where it was found, which was then a tropical, swampy forest.

Local schoolchildren named this bronze Diplodocus in the Evolution Garden Fern, and she’s surrounded by ferns and horsetails like those her real life counterpart would have lived alongside. She’s 22m-long, 4m-high and is a replica of a famous Diplodocus, Dippy, that stood in the main hall as the star attraction until 2017, when he went on tour. Dippy is on loan to the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry until February 2025, and now a massive blue whale skeleton hangs above the main hall. 

There’s also this replica skeleton of a Hypsilophodon, a dinosaur about the size of a large dog, which was native to the UK.

The garden to the left is the Nature Discovery Garden, where visitors and scientists can identify and study wildlife. Habitats range from wetlands to scrub and urban meadow and are monitored through an environmental data collection programme to support the understanding and recovery of urban nature. It’s home to tadpoles, toads, frogs, newts, mandarin ducks, dragonflies, lily pads and duckweed. A network of sensors gathers environmental and acoustic data – such as underwater recordings in the pond, the buzz of insect wings and bird calls to traffic noise – to help them understand how urban nature is changing and what can be done to support its recovery.

Judith Field

Natural History Museum, Cromwell Rd, London SW7 5BD