Jonathan Cohen's photos

The Natural History Museum was designed by Alfred Waterhouse in his own idiosyncratic Romanesque style which was inspired by his frequent visits to the Continent. Both the interiors and exteriors of the Waterhouse building make extensive use of terracotta tiles to resist the sooty climate of Victorian London, manufactured by the Tamworth-based company of Gibbs and Canning Limited. The tiles and bricks feature many relief sculptures of flora and fauna, with living and extinct species featured within the west and east wings respectively. This explicit separation was at the request of Owen, and has been seen as a statement of his contemporary rebuttal of Darwin’s attempt to link present species with past through the theory of natural selection.

The portal, known as the Portico de la Gloria is from the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. The original dates from the 12th century and is by the Master Mateo. In 1865, John Charles Robinson had visited Santiago de Compostela and on seeing the cathedral urged for a cast of the doorway to be made. This was prior to the construction of the Cast Courts and so allowed for the design to accommodate this vast artefact. The task of making the cast went to Domenico Brucciani & Company, a firm that later effectively acted as a franchise of the museum and continued to make casts until the early 1920s. The casting of this immense structure required an arduous sea voyage and protracted, delicate negotiations with the ecclesiastical authorities. At the opening of the Cast Courts, the cast of the Portico de la Gloria was critically acclaimed and was applauded as a "glory to the museum."