The Museums and Herbarium

William Hooker was also responsible for several museums in the Gardens. He had set about persuading the administrators of the need for a museum of economic botany, demonstrating the importance of plants to mankind.

When the Royal Kitchen Garden came into the possession of the Botanic Gardens in 1846, Hooker once again employed Decimus Burton as his architect and oversaw the conversion of the 18th century fruit store into a museum. As part of this development the rest of the Kitchen Garden was also redesigned, with elaborate curvaceous parterres creating the setting for the museum.

Hooker displayed his own personal collection of specimens of textiles, gums, dyes and timbers in the new Herbaceous Ground Museum, opened to the public in 1848 to instant success.

Collections grew with contributions from the Great Exhibition in 1851 and the Paris Exhibition of 1855. It soon became clear that the Museum was too small and Decimus Burton was asked to design a new, larger museum opposite the Palm House. This new 1857 museum was called Museum No. 1, with the first renamed as Museum No. 2 (now the School of Horticulture).

In the meantime, the Orangery became a Timber Museum and, most importantly, in 1852 Hooker succeeded in his campaign for more space to house his personal herbarium. He kept this open to the public in several rooms of Hunter House on Kew Green, now part of the Herbarium complex. The first official curator of the Herbarium, Allan A. Black, was appointed in 1853.

Following William Hooker's example in loaning his own collection to the Herbarium, other prominent botanists donated their own collections. The Herbarium grew rapidly in size and importance, especially with the donation of George Bentham's personal herbarium and the securing of the East India Company's collection.

During the process of identifying and cataloguing the East India Company Collection, it was found that there were nearly 400,000 duplicate specimens, and Hooker redistributed these between the principle British and Continental herbaria.

So many other renowned botanists and private collectors followed Bentham's example by donating their herbaria that soon, the only collection that rivalled Kew's Herbarium was that of British Museum.

The question of the distribution of the nation's herbaria between Kew and the British Museum reached such a level of debate that in 1860, a Parliamentary enquiry was held. The matter was finally resolved in 1862 when the Trustees of the British Museum decided that the natural history collections should leave the smog of Bloomsbury, a decision sanctioned by an Act of 1878. The Natural History Museum was built for this purpose in the then cleaner air of South Kensington, opening to the public in 1881.

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