Sketching at the Natural History Museum Gardens

I visited the recently revamped gardens at London’s Natural History Museum (free entry) to do a little sketching and escape from the bustle. The gardens provides another great outdoor space to get a little peace (and education!) from the city. Well worth a visit!

 

Evolution Garden (east side of the museum)

The east side lets you walk through the last few hundred million years of earths evolution, starting from the tube exit from South Kensington tube station tunnel. They’ve done a nice job creating a space that takes you through the history of earths species with little boards of information to read and models of the different species (including a bronze cast of Dippy - you cant go wrong with life-size dinosaurs outside). It will be interesting to see how this space feels once the plants have grown a bit, I’m hoping for a fully overgrown Jurassic forest but we shall see.

I just had to draw the new diplodocus model, named ‘Fern’.

 

Nature Discovery Garden (west side of the museum)

The West side of the museum has a new garden too, with a pond, activity centre, woods and lots of outdoor seating.

I sketched the view looking east from the west garden towards the Victoria & Albert Museum, this makes a really nice vista (minus the current scaffolding). I might make a full colour painting once that’s been removed

 

In the woods you can listen to hidden sounds including the noise a tree makes when pumping water up its trunk!

 

The gardens are open everyday of the week, If you want more information here is the NHM website… https://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit/galleries-and-museum-map/our-gardens.html