British Museum

Climb the broad steps between the tall columns and push inside, and the crowd scatters into a vast white courtyard under a curving glass roof. This is the British Museum, one of the oldest public museums in the world and still one of the largest, holding objects gathered from across the whole span of human history. Best of all, entry is free.

Its beginnings go back to the middle of the eighteenth century. The museum was founded in 1753, built around the collection of a single wealthy physician, and opened its doors to the public a few years later. The idea behind it was radical for the time: a collection held for the nation, open to all who were curious, rather than locked away for a private few.

The heart of the building is the Great Court, a covered square with a striking glass-and-steel roof added at the start of the 2000s. At its centre sits the round former Reading Room, where many famous scholars once worked. The court is the natural place to get your bearings before you plunge into the galleries that open off it.

Some objects here are known around the world. The Rosetta Stone, the slab that unlocked the reading of Egyptian hieroglyphs, draws a constant crowd, as do the Egyptian mummies upstairs and the towering winged bulls of ancient Assyria. Each sits at the centre of a story about how a lost language or a vanished empire was pieced back together.

The sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens are among the most beautiful and the most debated things in the building. Carved marble figures and panels from the great temple line a long gallery, and their presence here, far from Greece, is the subject of a long-running dispute over where they truly belong. The museum sets out its case; many disagree.

That debate is not unique to the marbles. A growing number of objects in the collection — taken in the age of empire, from Greece to West Africa and beyond — are now the subject of calls for return. You can enjoy the galleries and still hold that question in mind; it is part of what this kind of universal museum now has to reckon with.

The sheer scale is the first practical problem you will face. There are millions of objects and miles of galleries, and trying to see everything in one visit leaves most people exhausted and remembering little. The museum works far better if you choose two or three areas — say Egypt, Assyria, and the Parthenon — and let the rest go.

Beyond the famous names, quieter rooms reward the patient. Anglo-Saxon treasure from a buried ship, delicate clocks and watches, prints and drawings, and rooms of coins and everyday objects all tell smaller, human stories. Some of the most memorable things here are not the giants but the small, personal items that survived by chance.

The building itself is worth noticing. The grand columned front belongs to the middle of the nineteenth century, a temple to learning in the heart of literary Bloomsbury, and the contrast between that heavy stone and the light modern roof of the Great Court is part of the pleasure of moving through it.

A few practical notes help. Entry to the permanent collection is free, though special exhibitions are ticketed; bags are checked at the door, so travel light. The museum is busiest in the middle of the day, so an early or late visit is calmer, and late opening on certain evenings is one of the best-kept secrets for quiet galleries.

It sits in Bloomsbury, an easy walk from several Underground stations and from the bookshops and squares of literary London. You can fold a visit into a wider day in the area, dipping in for an hour or settling in for half a day, depending on how much the galleries pull you in.

Children are well served here, often more than their parents expect. Mummies, giant statues, and buried treasure hold young attention, and the museum runs trails and activities aimed at families. It makes an easy, free, weatherproof outing on a grey London day, which is part of why it is so heavily visited.

The museum also lends and shares objects around the world and runs a serious programme of research and conservation. What you see on display is only a fraction of the whole collection; far more is studied and stored behind the scenes, and the galleries rotate pieces out into the light over time.

Before you leave, return to the Great Court and sit for a moment under the glass. You have just walked past objects spanning thousands of years and most of the inhabited world, gathered, argued over, and preserved under one roof. Whatever you make of how they got here, the reach of human making on display is hard to take in all at once.