Cathedral of creation

Sometimes, it pays to rediscover what’s already under your nose. I’ve been umpteen times to the Natural History Museum but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it properly, not even at the evening parties I’ve been to under Dippy-the-Dinosaur, until now. I visited the new and refurbished Hintze Hall and it was a revelation. The thing that strikes most visitors is that there isn’t a dinosaur any more — Dippy is on tour — and he’s been replaced by Hope, who is a) a blue whale, b) female and c) genuine (the dinosaur was fake).

Swings and roundabouts. We have lost a dinosaur, but we’ve gained an entirely new perspective on an astonishing building, what a Times leader in 1881 called a ‘Temple of Nature’. What it does is remind us afresh of the genius of Alfred Waterhouse, and the profoundly Christian conception of the museum as a manifestation of the creative power of God by its founder, Richard Owen, a naturalist whose genius was matched only by his capacity for making enemies.

What the renovation of the great central hall has done is allowed us to see it properly, as effectively an ecclesiastical building. Hope-the-Whale has been winched into the ceiling, where her skeleton swoops down on her unseen prey. What that does is to clear the central space from the clutter around the dinosaur — except for some unfortunate information desks — and lift the viewer’s eye to the ceiling and the two upper galleries, with their forward-looking use of natural light.

Reader, it’s glorious.

The museum has been a victim of the old, hackneyed C.P. Snow idea of the two cultures; yet it’s visited by science people and families looking to keep the kiddies amused. Whereas the V&A across the road can be unapologetically beautiful, the Natural History Museum is for the people who don’t care about that sort of thing; they’re scientists, not aesthetes or religious.