Listen to Neil MacGregor's lecture celebrating the 250th anniversary of the public opening of the British Museum

It was 250 years ago this month that the British Museum first opened its doors to the public. When you visit the museum today, you visit somewhere that is like no other collection, no other building on earth. It is the only place where you can, in every sense, walk through the world, and through time, and look at the whole range of what humans have made and speculate as to what they have thought.

But the British Museum’s collection is a very odd one. There are great works of art in it, of course, such as the Iris from the Parthenon or Michelangelo’s only surviving study for Adam. But the British Museum is not a museum of art. And its collection has always led to contradiction with its name. It is a matter of bafflement to many people why it is called the British Museum when such a small percentage of the objects in it are British. But it is quintessentially British. It is effectively the first public institution to be called British — rather to our irritation, the British Linen Bank got there first. It was quintessentially British in 1753, when it was founded by parliament; and it is true today.

It was set up in Montague House, on the site of the current building, in a London that does a great deal, I think, to explain why it is the way it is; a London that was the centre of world trade. As early as 1711, Addison wrote, “There is no place in the town which I love to frequent as the Royal Exchange. It gives me a secret satisfaction, and in some measure it gratifies my vanity, as an Englishman, to see so rich an assembly of countrymen and foreigners consulting each other upon the private business of mankind, making this metropolis an emporium for the whole earth . . . Sometimes I am jostled by a body of Armenians, sometimes I’m lost in a crowd of Jews, and sometimes I make one in a group of Dutchmen. I am a Dane, a Swede, a Frenchman at different times, or rather I fancy myself, like the old philosopher, who upon being asked what countryman he was, replied that he was a citizen of the world.”

It was the first time anybody could really have said that, the early 18th century, and it’s the first place it could have been said. It is this London where Hans Sloane starts to build his collection. Sloane, who was the friend of Newton and Handel and Voltaire, who looked after Queen Anne as a doctor, who inoculated people against smallpox, was the man whose collection is the basis of the British Museum. He was a very clever doctor, an intellectual, and a rich one, because he is the man who realised that cocoa, which is clearly good for you, but very bitter, could be made drinkable if you mixed it with milk and sugar. Drinking chocolate is the fortune on which the British Museum is founded. And this enormous fortune, and this intellectual curiosity, enabled him, using the maritime contacts of London, to put together a collection of a sort that was unparalleled outside princely collections, and in many senses unparalleled anywhere.

But it was a collection with a purpose. Sloane, like so many of his generation, had been seared by the folk memory of the religious wars that shook Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. His idea of looking at humanity was to see in it what united people, and his collection is geared to showing what are the common elements of human experience. And so, for instance, he collects shoes from all over the world — wooden pattens from Malacca, Pyrenean espadrilles, leather shoes from Morocco, silk ones from China. What he was interested in was that everybody uses shoes, but every society addresses that need in a different way. And it’s a good metaphor, I think, for how Sloane saw the whole nature of different human cultures and, above all, religion. He thought one of the purposes of his collection was the confutation of atheism, but what he meant by that was that while all countries worshipped a god, they all worshipped gods in different ways.

It’s this worldwide collection of objects for comparison that Sloane, when he drew his will, offered for sale. He had two daughters, and he wanted to provide for them. And he wanted £20,000. Above all, he wanted his collection to stay together; and he offered it on condition that it should be freely available to anybody who wanted to consult it. He offered it first to George II.

It’s important to bear in mind that when Sloane makes his offer, this is a country that has recently experienced what was in effect a civil war, when the French-backed Catholic Stuarts got to Derby. There was panic in London, and a real fear that the parliamentary system of government could collapse. Anti-Catholic riots continued all through the century; and there was also a profound suspicion, not just of the French, but of the Scots. They were coming to London after the union in unacceptable numbers, and by the end of the century Richard Newton protested against these endless arrivals of pushy, ambitious Scots, many of them in the government, if you please!

George II doesn’t want to pay the £20,000. Parliament is asked, and parliament says, of course, it has no money. And so, like every British parliament, they say they can’t possibly afford to do something for the arts, but eventually they will have a lottery. So they did, bought the collection and then had to decide what to do with it.

This is a very crucial moment, because it’s a moment when parliament is consciously thinking: what kind of citizen does it want? There’s a consciousness that the role of government is to think what sort of society is desirable, and what kind of behaviour is to be fostered. And parliament does something completely extra- ordinary and without precedent. It decides it will give the collection to trustees, who will hold it for the public benefit, without private gain. It’s the first parliamentary trust, and it establishes something very remarkable. The trustees are to be representative of the nation — the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor, the Speaker of the House of the Commons — but also non-Anglicans. From the beginning there’s a Dissenting trustee, Lord Willoughby, and a Jewish benefactor, Solomon da Costa; and by 1766, a Catholic trustee. Even more remarkably, the trustees are not susceptible to instruction by parliament. So parliament creates a system where the museum will be funded by government, but not controlled by it. And the beneficiaries of that trust are “all studious and curious persons, both native and foreign”. Information and knowledge are established as a civic good. The British Museum becomes the private study collection of every citizen. And that is still one of its great traditions.

From the start, the kind of person who came was striking. This was not the elite world of Sloane’s friends. In 1784 it was reported to the trustees that “those recently admitted consisted chiefly of mechanics and persons of the lower classes”. And the museum continues to welcome all visitors. Once it had opened totally without admission tickets, and on days when people were not working, the numbers were enormous. On Easter Monday, 1837, 23,000 visitors came in one day. Those are numbers that would still strike us as astonishing.

The latest census shows that one in 20 of the population of central London is recently arrived from sub-Saharan Africa. The questions our collections raise, for example, about the long history of Africa, of slavery, are not questions about another place, they are questions about our city. We are back in the position where we have to address the whole world, and in a new way.

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