Picture a carriage making its way through London to Buckingham Palace, pulled not by horses, but by four zebras. Holding the reins is Walter Rothschild: heir to a banking fortune, Member of Parliament, and quite possibly the most devoted animal collector who ever lived. He wants to prove that zebras can be tamed. True story.
Rothschild was very shy around people and had a speech impediment, but around animals he was fearless and relentless. With the resources of one of Europe's wealthiest families, he built his own museum to hold what he collected. It still stands in the quiet market town of Tring, Hertfordshire, and it is one of the strangest, most wonderful museums in Britain: the Natural History Museum at Tring.
A Collection Like No Other
At its largest, Rothschild's collection was the biggest zoological collection ever amassed by a private individual: 300,000 bird skins, 200,000 birds' eggs, 2,250,000 butterflies, 30,000 beetles, and thousands of mammals, reptiles and fish. He couldn't travel everywhere himself, so he paid explorers, professional collectors and local residents to collect for him in remote corners of the world. More than 150 insects, 58 birds and 17 mammals are named after him, including Rothschild's giraffe.
What you can visit today is the heart of it: over 4,000 objects across six galleries, in cases that run from floor to ceiling inside a Victorian building. There's a polar bear and an emperor penguin in Gallery 1, a whole display of zebras and their relatives in Gallery 4, a giant panda, a startling case of domestic dogs, from lapdogs to racing greyhounds, and the skeleton of a giant ground sloth. There are fleas in tiny outfits. And there are animals you can no longer see alive anywhere: the thylacine, the great auk, and the quagga, extinct since 1883.
Why Tring Still Matters
Most museums have been modernised, re-lit and re-interpreted over the decades. Tring still feels like the private museum it was built to be, and that's exactly the point. It's a working time capsule of how Victorians understood and displayed the natural world: a museum about natural history that has itself become a piece of history.
Rothschild built it in 1889 in the grounds of his family's estate and opened it to the public in 1892. When he died in 1937, the museum and everything in it went to the nation, and Tring is now part of the Natural History Museum in London. The Rothschild Room tells the story of the man himself and his family. He kept 144 giant tortoises and 64 cassowaries, and was once photographed riding one of the tortoises, so naturally the room has a life-sized replica of one.
If you like museums that are really one person's obsession, Tring belongs in the same family as Sir John Soane's Museum. It's exactly the kind of place I had in mind when I wrote about the best museum you've never heard of.
Planning Your Visit
The best part? It's completely free. The Natural History Museum at Tring is open Tuesday to Sunday and on bank holidays, from 10:00 to 17:00, with last entry at 16:00. It's closed on Mondays (except bank holidays) and over Christmas, 24 to 26 December. Booking a free ticket is recommended, as walk-up spaces are limited.
The museum is on Akeman Street in Tring, about 48 kilometres northwest of London. There are regular trains from London Euston to Tring station, which makes it an easy day trip. The station is about three kilometres from the museum, though, so plan on a bus or taxi for the last stretch rather than a walk. Bringing children? The museum has free self-guided tours for adults leading small groups of kids, and either way, leave plenty of time to wander the galleries. There's far more packed into them than you'd expect.
Opening hours, directions and more are on the museum's Mooseum page. Making a weekend of it? There's plenty more in my London museum list and in free museums across Europe.
One Last Image
Picture it one more time: a wealthy, bashful man who couldn't quite manage small talk, steering a team of zebras through the streets of London because the animals fascinated him more than any dinner party ever could. That same obsession built a museum that, well over a century later, still delights everyone who walks through the door.
Mooseum helps you discover, plan, and remember your museum visits. Find more museums in the United Kingdom, many of them free.