The Natural History Museum is set to open a major green space in central London to support urban nature, scientific research and education, complete with a huge brand-new bronze dinosaur.
Five acres wrapping around the building in South Kensington have been transformed into two gardens – the Nature Discovery Garden and the Evolution Garden, which tell the story of the changing natural world.
The new landscape opens from Thursday as a free-to-visit “outdoor gallery” as well as a “living laboratory” to support nature recovery in the face of climate change, the museum said.
The £25 million project is expected to be one of the most intensively studied urban nature sites globally.
To mark the project’s completion on Tuesday, the new bronze Diplodocus, named “Fern” by local school children, was unveiled in the Jurassic landscape of the Evolution Garden.
The Nature Discovery Garden was also revealed as a space for visitors and scientists to learn about the biodiversity that can be found in the UK’s urban spaces.
Museum director Dr Doug Gurr called it “a national learning, science and public engagement initiative to make our towns and cities healthier and more sustainable places to live”.
Delivering a speech in the gardens on Tuesday, he said: “Today is just the start.
“Over the coming months and years, the nature here will flourish and grow, the scientific understanding will grow and millions and millions of young people will have the opportunity to reconnect with nature, to participate in new outdoor workshops and engage in the all-important work of understanding how nature recovery begins on our doorsteps.”
Visitors can explore natural history dating back 2.7 billion years in the Evolution Garden, told through the immersive timeline of plants and rocks of different geological periods from across the UK.
As they move into the present day and Anthropocene period, the paving stones are embedded with crushed glass, pottery and even a piece of plastic to show humanity’s growing impact on the natural world.
The garden also includes a second bronze dinosaur at Fern’s side – a Hypsilophodon, which was native to the UK.
In the Nature Discovery Garden, the network of ponds and vegetation is already teeming with toad tadpoles, baby frogs, newts, mandarin ducks, dragonflies, lily pads and duckweed.
The team has also built a nature activity centre in the garden that combines facilities for scientific work, a training space for future urban ecologists and a hub for school workshops.
Scientists will collect “eDNA samples” of wildlife in the gardens and monitor how this changes over time.
A network of 25 scientific sensors will also gather environmental and acoustic data – such as underwater recordings in the pond, the buzz of insect wings and bird calls to traffic noise – to help them understand how urban nature is changing and what can be done to support its recovery.
The museum’s new “Data Ecosystem” will help its scientists to collect, enrich and share multiple biodiversity data types alongside environmental data such as water chemistry, rapidly and accurately, from a range of sources.
John Tweedle, head of the museum’s Centre for UK Nature, said the aim is to build “a really detailed digital picture of the nature that’s here”.
“We can start to look at how urban nature adapts, which species do well, which less so, which come in,” he told the PA news agency.
Using the example of a new grassland area, he said: “We’ll study how different ways of managing that benefit different types of wildlife and we can share that with practical land managers.
“It’s applied research. It’s looking at how can we develop ways to better understand wildlife, rapidly assess the wildlife there, but in particular, how we can use that information to understand how the changes we make do or don’t benefit wildlife.”
In terms of design and construction, the museum took a sustainable approach that included a diesel-free site, no waste sent to landfill, peat-free fertilisers, a carbon budget, recycled materials and building a drainage system to harvest rainwater for the plants.
Keith Jennings, director of estates, projects and master planning, said: “We’re the Natural History Museum – sustainability and biodiversity is in our DNA.
“We needed to demonstrate that you can construct in a sustainable way otherwise we wouldn’t be true to our values.
“That has been a real challenge,” he said, adding that materials and how to carry out the construction were “the really big issues”.
“But it’s our job to push boundaries,” he said. “Everybody else is going to reap the benefits of this scheme.”
The Urban Nature Project was funded by a range of trusts, foundations and companies as well as individuals including Amazon Web Services, The National Lottery Heritage Fund and Evolution Education Trust, The Cadogan Charity and Garfield Weston Foundation.
