British Museum: An Unofficial Audio Tour with the Museum Guide (opens in a new tab)
2 h 30 min – 3 h
The British Museum holds more than 8 million objects spanning every inhabited continent and nearly every era of human history. On this self-guided audio tour, you'll move through the museum's most celebrated galleries, from Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt to Anglo-Saxon England and Classical Greece. You'll also discover how seemingly unrelated objects are connected across space and time. The tour starts in the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, Norman Foster's spectacular glass-roofed atrium. From there, you'll explore the Enlightenment Gallery, where the museum's origins are tied to an Irish physician's collection of 71,000 objects bankrolled by Jamaican sugar plantations. You'll encounter the mummified remains of Henutmehyt, a wealthy Egyptian priestess buried with enough food for one final meal. The tour ends in the Parthenon Galleries, home to sculptures prised from the Acropolis by Lord Elgin – beautiful, contested, and still at the centre of one of archaeology's great debates.
