Museums carefully curate what they want us to see. But research into 42,000 journeys through the British Museum suggests that the building itself may have just as much influence on what visitors actually experience. Two centuries after Robert Smirke designed his great Greek Revival museum, the findings offer a fascinating insight into how stairs, proximity and circulation quietly curate our encounters with culture. They also have particular resonance today, as the Museum prepares for one of the greatest architectural transformations in its history.
Walk into the British Museum with several hours to spare and the possibilities can feel almost overwhelming. More than eight million objects belong to its collection, spread across galleries ranging from ancient Egypt and Assyria to Africa, Asia and medieval Europe. Even the most determined visitor will see only a fraction of them.
This September will bring another extraordinary reason to visit, when the Bayeux Tapestry goes on display at the British Museum for the first time in Britain since it was made almost 1,000 years ago. The arrival of an object of such cultural significance is a reminder of the enormous thought museums devote to what we see and how we see it. Collections are interpreted, objects grouped and exhibitions designed so that moving through a museum becomes a journey through cultures, periods and ideas.
Yet there is another influence on that journey which is much easier to overlook: the building itself.
A study by researchers Naomi Muggleton, Timothy Monteath and Taha Yasseri analysed 42,000 visitor journeys through the British Museum, alongside more than 50,000 visitor reviews. Using audio-guide data to understand how people actually moved around the building, the researchers found that physical accessibility and proximity had a powerful effect on where people went. In particular, visitors showed an aversion to stairs, while the popularity of individual rooms was more strongly predicted by their physical accessibility than by their curatorial content.
It is a striking finding. Museums put enormous intellectual effort into deciding what they want visitors to encounter, yet the architecture surrounding those collections is quietly making its own contribution to the selection.
Objects in a museum are placed together to establish relationships. Galleries are organised around historical periods, places and themes, while interpretation encourages us to understand one object through another. Architecture establishes a second hierarchy alongside this curatorial one.
A gallery immediately visible from a major circulation space has an advantage over one reached through several rooms. A collection on the same level as a popular gallery is encountered differently from one requiring another staircase. Doorways, corridors, sightlines and distances can make one route feel like the natural continuation of a visit while another requires a conscious decision to explore further.
The British Museum researchers identified four broad patterns of visitor behaviour, ranging from highly engaged visitors who travelled extensively through the building to people making much shorter and more selective visits. Across this behaviour, their spatial analysis found that visitors were not simply following the thematic organisation of the museum. They were responding to the effort required to move through it.
This does not necessarily amount to laziness, and nor is it simply a question of physical accessibility. A museum visit involves a continual series of small decisions about time, energy, curiosity and reward. The importance of the research lies in making those decisions visible at scale. Faced with another staircase, a distant gallery or a route that appears to involve retracing our steps, visitors make choices that cumulatively determine which parts of the collection receive their attention.
The result is a museum shaped not only by curatorial intention, but by the routes through it that feel most natural to follow.
At the British Museum, the relationship between architecture and visitor behaviour is particularly interesting because the building was conceived for a radically different kind of museum visit.
The institution itself dates to 1753 and opened in Montagu House in Bloomsbury in 1759. Although established as a free national public museum, early access bore little resemblance to walking through its doors today. Visitors initially had to apply for tickets, visiting hours were restricted and access to the collection was much more controlled.
By the early nineteenth century, the collection had outgrown Montagu House. In 1823, the architect Sir Robert Smirke began work on the great quadrangular building that still defines the Museum today. Designed in the Greek Revival style, it was constructed progressively over the following decades and completed in 1852.
Smirke designed on a monumental scale. The great south front, with its broad flight of steps, monumental Ionic colonnade and pediment, presented the museum almost as a temple to human knowledge. Inside, the architecture continued that classical language. The King’s Library, now the Enlightenment Gallery, extends for around 91 metres through the east wing.
The grandeur was deliberate. The British Museum describes Smirke’s architecture as reflecting the significance of the objects housed within it. This was architecture being used not simply to contain a collection, but to establish expectations about the importance of the institution and the knowledge encountered inside.
It was also a museum designed to accommodate around 100,000 visitors a year. In 2025/26, 6.5 million people visited.
The contrast is important. Smirke could hardly have anticipated contemporary levels of international tourism, family visits, cafés, shops, temporary exhibitions and the expectation that millions of people should be able to explore the building relatively freely. The assumptions surrounding what a museum was and how somebody behaved inside one have changed enormously, while much of the architectural framework through which visitors move remains almost two centuries old.
The behavioural research therefore provides an unexpected opportunity to see how contemporary visitors respond to nineteenth-century architectural thinking.
The British Museum has been adapting that architecture almost since it was completed. Its most dramatic modern intervention came at the end of the twentieth century, when the departure of the British Library created an opportunity to reconsider the enormous courtyard at the centre of Smirke’s quadrangle.
For more than a century, this had been occupied by the Museum’s library department, including Sydney Smirke’s circular Reading Room and the surrounding bookstacks. Following the Library’s move to St Pancras in 1997, Foster + Partners transformed the courtyard into the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, which opened in 2000.
The intervention is best known for its spectacular glass and steel roof, but its importance to the experience of the Museum went much further. A previously inaccessible courtyard became the building’s central public space. As the British Museum records in its history of the Great Court, the project gave visitors the opportunity to move freely around the Museum’s main floor for the first time in more than 150 years.
It changed the hierarchy of the building by changing the way people could move through it. That transformation gives the visitor research additional resonance because it demonstrates that circulation is not something that simply happens after a museum has been designed. Altering the way rooms and spaces connect can fundamentally change how an institution and its collection are experienced.
Museum architects have long understood this relationship. Writing about the work of David Chipperfield, whose extensive museum projects include Berlin’s Neues Museum and Neue Nationalgalerie, architectural writer Deyan Sudjic has described Chipperfield’s attempt to “dissolve the distinction between container and content”. Rather than regarding architecture as a spectacular shell surrounding the collection, this approach treats proportion, light, spatial planning and movement as integral to the cultural experience.
The British Museum study provides an intriguing behavioural counterpart to that architectural thinking. Rooms establish pace, entrances establish expectations and openings reveal what comes next. Long vistas can encourage movement, while dead ends and changes of level can make another collection feel considerably further away. Exceptional museum architecture is not simply about creating beautiful spaces around exceptional objects; it is also about understanding how those spaces shape the encounters visitors eventually have with them.
That relationship has particular relevance as the British Museum works through its long-term Masterplan to restore its historic buildings and redisplay the collection. At the heart of this is the redevelopment of the Western Range, containing a third of the Museum’s gallery space and collections from ancient Greece, Egypt, Rome, Assyria and the Middle East.
The architectural challenge is considerable. What appears from outside to be a coherent nineteenth-century institution is, in places, an accumulation of buildings constructed and altered over almost two centuries. The Western Range alone contains ten separate buildings, from parts of Smirke’s original museum to later additions, all of which now have to accommodate visitor numbers and expectations far beyond those envisaged by their designers.
Architect Lina Ghotmeh and her practice are leading the redesign. Her approach, described as an “Archaeology of the Future”, begins with close examination of the history and material already present before determining how a building should evolve. At the British Museum, that means working with Smirke and almost two centuries of subsequent alteration rather than attempting to wipe the architectural slate clean.
The Museum has also made clear that architecture and curation will be considered together. Its plans for the Western Range combine restored historic spaces with new galleries and improvements to circulation and visitor experience, alongside a major redisplay intended to create new connections between cultures and collections.
The visitor research adds an intriguing dimension to that work. If physical accessibility and proximity can influence gallery popularity more strongly than curatorial content, the positioning and connection of galleries inevitably helps determine which of those cultural relationships visitors actually discover. The quality of museum architecture therefore lies partly in creating spaces that allow curiosity to flourish rather than unintentionally narrowing the choices people make.
There is something appealing about imagining a museum visit as an entirely personal journey. Faced with millions of objects and dozens of galleries, we construct our own route through human history according to whatever catches our attention. The British Museum research complicates that picture by showing how our choices are also shaped by decisions made long before we arrive.
At Bloomsbury, those decisions stretch across two centuries. Smirke established the basic plan in the 1820s, successive generations added new galleries and buildings, and Foster + Partners opened the centre of the Museum to public circulation in 2000. Curators continue to decide where collections belong, while Ghotmeh and her collaborators are now preparing to reshape a substantial part of the building for another generation.
The research is fascinating in its own right, but it also touches lightly on a wider issue for London. Much of the city has been inherited from previous generations and designed around assumptions about its users that have subsequently changed. As The London Society has explored elsewhere in considering accessibility and inclusive architecture, adapting a centuries-old city involves understanding how design affects people’s experience of the places they use, not simply preserving the architecture they have inherited.
Museums make that relationship unusually visible because curatorial intention can now be compared with observed visitor behaviour. The objects may be chosen by curators and the routes established by architects, but visitors ultimately create their own museum somewhere between the two. The emerging evidence from the British Museum suggests that exceptional architecture matters not simply because of what it looks like, but because it quietly shapes the cultural journeys we are able, and inclined, to make.
