We enter the Natural History Museum at Tring housing one of the finest collections of stuffed mammals, aquatic creatures, birds, reptiles and insects. Once the private museum of Lord Rothschild, established in 1889 and donated to our nation in 1937.
The museum is divided into six galleries. We take the stairs to galleries three and four, and walk along the balcony of the central atrium. We open a collection of wooden cabinets filled with specimens. The sheer biodiversity is astounding! Never mind Natural History, some of these creatures look supernatural! The first cabinet I open houses a huge millipede and some weird and wonderful moths and butterflies, their iridescent wings patterned with shots of vibrant green and red.
Hundreds of rare bird species such as hummingbirds, sunbeams and comets native to New Guinea and multi-coloured Quetzal birds native to South America are presented in a Victorian hexagonal cabinet. I’m amazed by how tiny some of them are and I love their peculiar names, such as the purple-throated sun angel. Next we see some gigantic fish from a ferocious barracuda, to a sleek silver-blue swordfish, and a crab with legs so endlessly long that they span the entire cabinet.
We take the stairs and find ourselves stepping into a dark corridor furnished with wall-to-wall cabinets filled with hundreds of mammals. There’s an extensive collection including extinct animals such as the Dodo and the Moa. I seem to have turned into a teenager as the unusual ones have us in hysterics. My daughter and I are giggling at an extinct elephant-bird’s foot, at a giant Emu staring menacingly at us, at a saiga with weird bloated nostrils, and at a chubby walrus with huge tusks looking up at us. The dim lights, crowds and length of the corridor are quite disorientating and we both feel as if we’ve entered into a David Lynch film.
Downstairs is a central atrium with more cabinets filled with altogether more recognisable mammals. I pause and stare into the intelligent eyes of a chimp and at the luminous blue and red stripes across a mandrills’ elongated face; just a sheet of glass between my face and theirs. It’s pretty noisy in here, as its the school holidays. The space is packed with children filling in their worksheets on clipboards and yelling with enthusiasm as they’re presented with angry gorillas and ferocious tigers.
Later, we have the Rothschild room to ourselves. At its centre is a life-size replica of a giant tortoise, but I’m more fascinated with old black and white photos revealing Lord Rothschild in all of his glory riding on the back of a tortoise, and riding in a zebra drawn carriage. I pop into the shop to end our tour and buy his biography, curious to find out more about this eccentric aristocrat and his remarkable menagerie.
