Gardens for the ages radically reframe the Natural History Museum

The Urban Nature Project, in London’s South Kensington, exists in the landscape wings of the Natural History Museum. Yet with just a few small built interventions and a storytelling weaving of landscape routes, it radically changes the context of the museum.

From disconnected objects in a sunken leftover space, the grand Victorian walls of Alfred Waterhouse have become part of the connective tissue of the city while also, somehow, Feilden Fowles and J & L Gibbons’ scheme brings the fossilised dinosaurs of the museum alive by walking visitors through landscapes spanning millennia. At the same time, small new museum buildings speak to developments in architecture and our treatment of knowledge. 

Time-travelling trails

London can feel like a hellhole sometimes. Hot tarmac, hot feet, a closed tube station, crowds of confused tourists, loud lorries… I arrive at the museum frustrated and cross.

It takes time for the new landscape to seep into my psyche; the curving paths are still busy, but with happily engaged people, relaxing in the shade of the huge plane trees around the site, taken up with the intricacies of the ferns and details of little brass creatures that pop up here and there.

Of course, you should arrive through the tunnel from South Kensington Underground Station into the project’s Evolution Garden, to the east. Visitors are led up into the garden past steep walls of rock, angled to evoke geological formations. This route starts with the earliest rock types and the plants from around when they are formed, before moving through time, with a metre representing five million years.

Here, I get caught up in the story. Even the stone aggregate in the terrazzo matches the geological time of that part of the journey; when we reach the Anthropocene era you can see glass and ceramics creeping in. 

Walking around with Edmund Fowles and Matthew Glen from Feilden Fowles, and Neil Davidson from J & L Gibbons, it is hard not to be drawn into the poetry of selecting plants and stones for it, from Lewisian gneiss sourced from the Outer Hebrides to grey, then pink granite. The team visited quarries, photographed and then digitally mapped each slice of rock ready to be dry laid.

The practice’s drawing of the wall, referring back to those of pioneer geologist William Smith, will no doubt be taking its place at the Royal Academy show this summer. But it is the detail of the inset brass dates – and occasionally footprints – and the sense of calm that impressed me more on the ground. For many dinosaur-crazy visitors, it will likely be the life-sized diplodocus cast.

People and plants vie for space in airy new café

On this eastern side, no buildings were planned. But a café, the Garden Kitchen, now nestles up to the 1960s museum extension – which has a blank base no more. It cleverly taps into the existing services undercroft, with new toilets and storage in there. An elegant octagonal event room has also been claimed from the projecting undercroft, softened by a clay plaster ceiling and felt made of recycled bottles, then sharpened up again by delineation with brass edges. 

The café has a robust modesty. The lantern above the main volume provides welcome height and light while timber, glulam and wood wool, combined with large plants inside and views onto those outside, offer an airy, natural feel. The winter garden running along the front of the café, meant as an area to keep tender plants warm, seems likely to be too valuable for café visitors; but it has at least driven the design of a deep sill, which works as a perching place inside and out. 

The Natural History Museum’s central entrance has not been touched by this project, since it was recently repaved. This is a little disappointing, and leaves the institution’s queue to be managed by metal crowd barriers. 

Over the years, the west side of the museum has seen the addition of HOK’s hung-glass Darwin Centre and a concrete coated ‘egg’ designed by C.F. Møller, behind another glass facade. These have not been touched either, but two distinct gardens have been reworked and the Nature Activity Centre added between them. The rather bleak paved amphitheatre has been reimagined for our warming world, with the hard surfaces generously interspersed with drought-tolerant plants. It’s a delight.

Water worlds and striking stonework

The ponds of the wildlife garden have, meanwhile, been raised. You can walk between the walls feeling almost part of the water: at this level there is no need for pond-dipping to be a high-stakes activity. Thanks to the museum scientists studying the gardens, many new species have been identified here. And the retention of all the water on this part of site has driven the architectural expression of the centre.

The Nature Activity Centre is part classroom, part local lab and part volunteer station. The roof of the centre is all about the joy of water, its patterned tiles signalling the drop of water as much as picking up on the famous terracotta patterns of Waterhouse’s main museum building. And the rills on either side are justifiably oversized, but also celebratory. 

The generous roof overhangs allow rain to encase the building when it falls, without gutters – and are wonderful as well on a hot day. The verandah has the same wide sills as the café, but here they will be a base, and shelter for, kids pulling on welly boots.  

The centre shares a modesty in scale with the Garden Kitchen building. It also speaks to its sister building with a cutaway corner of a projecting roof and a limestone column. Both buildings have a stack of three limestones: Purbeck spangle, Clipsham and Ancaster. On this highly visible corner they are jauntily mis-stacked giving a sense of dynamism and of the – somewhat playful – hand of the designer.

It is here that I stop to consider the low-tech mantra that Feilden Fowles has espoused – and quite how hard that is to achieve. The masonry column is load-bearing but the stone itself could only be an 80mm face with low carbon blocks behind, for cost reasons. But if you don’t think too deeply about it, you can still enjoy the column for what it is.

Despite its unassuming character, the Nature Activity Centre is as generously and joyously executed as you might guess from its references: that of Feilden Fowles’ own studio near Waterloo, pushed in the direction and solid materiality of Carlo Scarpa (water channels; straight lines; a circle). As with these tested forebears, it has a warm charm that builds a calm expectation.

In 2018, Niall McLaughlin won an international competition for this site. It had a far greater scope to intervene, with a new level below the gardens providing entry to the museum. It was never built. We are now in an age of reusing and retweaking buildings and the Urban Nature Project, with a rethought brief, does that beautifully, reframing the Natural History Museum and extending its learning out towards the streets beyond. 

In numbers 

Garden Kitchen 660m²
Nature Activity Centre supported by AWS 220m²
Form of contract (JCT Standard Building Contract) Traditional 
Whole-life carbon CO₂/m² Garden Kitchen 547kg 
Whole-life carbon CO₂/m² Nature Activity Centre supported by AWS (A1-A5 and C1-C4) 636kg