The Natural History Museum’s reimagined gardens open to public

Creating a sustainable design that works with the landscape and taking an ambitious approach to sustainable construction – from a diesel-free site and no waste sent to landfill to harvesting rainwater for the plants – has been at the heart of the redevelopment. The Museum’s Wildlife Garden was extended to double the area of native habitats within the grounds and the pond area has been increased by 60%, to better support the animal and plant life diversity. 

Key sustainability features include: 

• A diesel-free, waste-free construction site with all excess site material recycled
• Locally sourced natural materials including solid Douglas fir and limestones 
• Low embodied carbon building materials meeting RIBA Climate Challenge targets
• Passive design principles for buildings; natural ventilation, excellent thermal and airtightness performance
• A holistic site wide water strategy, including rainwater harvesting from buildings and surface water distributed to water plants in the gardens’ landscape

Electric-based air source heat pumps provide the space heating and majority of hot water demands in the buildings. The all-electric approach to serve the project provides a route towards net zero carbon operation. 

Our approach to external lighting was driven by a need to carefully balance the risk of light pollution with delivering an interesting, exciting and inclusive environment for visitors after dark and on winter afternoons. We created a comprehensive photometric model of the whole site we could use to precisely test out our proposals, giving us the opportunity to have some fun lighting the content whilst making sure there was no avoidable light spill from any of the fittings.

Lighting the dinosaurs was a particular pleasure for our team, as the carefully positioned spotlights make the bronze skeletons sparkle in the undergrowth. For Fern, the Diplodocus, the lighting creates dramatic dinosaur shadows that play across the Museum walls.

The acoustic design mirrors the design philosophy of the two buildings, controlling reverberation in the Learning and Activity Centre, supported by Amazon Web Services, and the Garden Kitchen with wood wool boards fitted between the exposed timber structure. This helps ensure that noise levels in the spaces stay comfortable when the spaces are busy, and aids the intelligibility of speech when the they are being used for education. 

The transformation of the five-acre site is part of the Museum’s Urban Nature Project, responding to the urgent need to monitor and record changes to UK urban nature and support its recovery. 

As well as a place for visitors to explore the diversity of life on Earth, the gardens are a living laboratory, and one of the most intensively studied urban nature sites of its kind in the world. 

Scientists will observe wildlife and collect eDNA samples from the gardens. A network of 25 scientific sensors will also gather environmental and acoustic data – from underwater recordings in the pond and the buzz of insect wings to bird calls to traffic noise – to help them understand how urban nature is changing and what we can do to support its recovery. Once fully installed, the network of sensors in the gardens will collect up to 20 terabytes of audio data in the first year.