From Dar es Salaam to South Kensington: A week behind the scenes at the Natural History Museum
When colleagues from the University of Dar es Salaam came to London, the plan was simple: see some collections, meet some curators and talk about how museums can preserve and use natural history for the future. What actually happened was a whirlwind tour through storerooms, galleries, laboratories, museums and some rather extraordinary pieces of natural history.
There are some museum visits where you walk through the front door, admire a few exhibits, perhaps buy something from the shop and leave.
And then there are visits where you find yourself standing in a room full of thousands of specimens, opening drawers, peering into jars containing animals collected generations ago, discussing the future of natural history collections—and suddenly realising that the museum is much, much bigger than the building everyone sees.
The visit of colleagues from the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) to the Natural History Museum in London in March 2026 was very much in the second category.
The visit formed part of the growing collaboration between colleagues in Tanzania and the UK through the Hazina project, with a particular interest in natural history collections, their conservation, their histories and, perhaps most importantly, their future.
For the visitors from Dar es Salaam, it was an opportunity to see behind the scenes of one of the world's great natural history museums. For those of us at the NHM and our colleagues at Cambridge and the British Museum, it was equally valuable: an opportunity to look at our own collections through different eyes. And, as it turned out, there was quite a lot to see.
From Dar es Salaam to London
The UDSM team arrive at the Natural History Museum for a week of behind-the-scenes visits and collections tours.
The UDSM team left Dar es Salaam late on Saturday night, flying through Amsterdam before arriving in London on Sunday morning. The itinerary was ambitious from the beginning: collections, laboratories, curators, museums, researchers, a visit to Tring—and, somewhere in between, finding time to see a little bit of London.
The schedule ran for six days, with the first day in London including a visit to the Natural History Museum and its galleries before heading out to see some of the city. The following days were packed with collection visits and meetings.
There is always something slightly surreal about bringing visitors to the Natural History Museum for the first time. The building itself is hard to ignore.
The great Romanesque architecture, the enormous Hintze Hall and the famous blue whale “hope” hanging above visitors all make an immediate impression. But after the initial "wow" comes the realisation that what visitors see in the public galleries is only a tiny window into what the museum actually contains. The real museum is behind the doors. And that was where we were heading.
Behind the scenes
One of the themes running through the visit was the idea that a natural history museum is not really a building—it is a collection of knowledge. The specimens are the physical evidence, but attached to them are names, places, dates, collectors, observations, photographs, field notes, taxonomic histories and increasingly DNA and other forms of molecular information. For colleagues working with collections in Tanzania, this was particularly relevant.
The University of Dar es Salaam has its own important natural history collections, including vertebrate material. The Hazina project is concerned with helping to develop the infrastructure, skills and partnerships needed to ensure that these collections can be properly cared for and, importantly, used by future generations of scientists.
So the visit was never simply about looking at old specimens. It was about asking questions. How are they stored? How are they catalogued? How do curators know what is there? How do you decide what needs attention first? How can historical collections be made useful to modern researchers? And perhaps the biggest question of all:
How do you make sure that collections survive long enough to answer questions that nobody has thought of yet?
The Wandsworth adventure
On Monday morning we headed south-west across London to the Natural History Museum's storage facility. There is no grand staircase, no famous dinosaur skeleton and no queue of tourists. But behind the doors is another part of the museum's story. The morning visit was specifically designed around the historic collections, with particular emphasis on vertebrate specimens and their collectors. And this is where things start to become really interesting.
Behind the scenes: exploring the Natural History Museum's collections.
Once you get into a collection store, the specimens stop looking like museum exhibits and start looking like evidence. A drawer might contain dozens of specimens. A jar may hold an animal collected decades ago. A specimen label might contain just a few lines of handwriting, but those few lines can potentially tell us where an animal lived, who collected it, when it was collected and sometimes why it was collected in the first place.
For a scientist from Tanzania, seeing specimens from East Africa sitting in a London collection can be a strangely powerful experience. Some of these animals originated in landscapes that the UDSM researchers know intimately. Some were collected by people whose names have become part of the history of African zoology. And some specimens represent places and populations that may have changed dramatically since the animals were collected. The collections therefore become much more than cupboards full of dead animals. They become time capsules.
The people behind the specimens
One of the strongest themes of the visit was the importance of the people who made the collections. It is easy to look at an old museum specimen and think only about the animal. But every specimen has a story. Someone had to find it. Someone collected it. Someone prepared it. Someone labelled it. Someone transported it. Someone catalogued it. And someone, decades or even centuries later, has to work out how to preserve it. That human story is increasingly important in understanding natural history collections.
During the Wandsworth visit, the group included curators and researchers from the NHM, Cambridge and the British Museum, alongside colleagues from UDSM. The group included Isabel Davis, whose work explores collections through arts and humanities perspectives; Charlotte Wood, whose PhD research examines how natural history museums shape conservation in East Africa; Dr Matt Davis and his group of students and postdocs at Cambridge University (Dr Eva Namusoke, Melanie Siranathsingh, Benny Q. Shen, Ella Beaudoin), and Zoe Cormack from the British Museum, alongside the UDSM visitors. That mixture was important. The conversation was not just about zoology. It was about history, collecting, conservation, museums, people and the changing ways in which collections are understood.
From drawers to mammals
After the morning at Wandsworth, the group headed back to South Kensington for an afternoon looking at the Mammal and Entomological collections. For visitors who work primarily with living animals in the field, there is something fascinating about suddenly being surrounded by thousands of specimens. Field biologists normally encounter an animal for a few seconds—or perhaps a few minutes.
A museum gives you the opportunity to return to that animal again and again. You can compare it with another specimen collected hundreds of kilometres away. You can examine variation between populations. You can look at old distribution records. You can revisit a taxonomic problem. And, increasingly, you can extract information that the original collector could never have imagined would be possible. The same specimen that once represented a single animal can now potentially contribute to questions about climate change, habitat loss, disease, population genetics, evolution and biodiversity change. That is one of the great strengths of natural history collections.
They get more valuable as science develops.
And then there were the insects…
If vertebrate collections can be impressive, entomology operates on another scale altogether. Drawers upon drawers. Tiny labels. Tiny specimens. Huge amounts of information. For anyone unfamiliar with museum entomology, the sheer number of specimens can be difficult to comprehend. And yet the principle is the same. Every little pinned insect represents a place, a date and a moment in time. Together, millions of these moments can tell us something about how the natural world has changed. For the UDSM visitors, this was particularly relevant to conversations about how collections in Tanzania might be developed and made more accessible to researchers in the future.
The challenge is not simply to preserve specimens. It is to unlock the information contained within them.
A museum that is changing
There was another theme running through the visit: the NHM itself is changing. The museum is currently preparing for one of the most ambitious collection moves in its history, with millions of specimens destined for new facilities. The scale is almost impossible to imagine.
The BBC World Service programme The Documentary: An animal exodus captures something of this extraordinary challenge, exploring the planned movement of the Natural History Museum's collections and the practical problems involved—from tiny insects to huge taxidermied animals and even a ten-metre anaconda. The programme features NHM curators discussing the logistical and scientific challenges of moving such an enormous collection. It was rather fitting, then, that the BBC was also part of the story of the UDSM visit.
The Hazina team had the opportunity to take part in a BBC World Service recording at the museum, talking about the visit and about the extraordinary objects and specimens that surround us.
The BBC feature provides a fascinating reminder that collections are not static. They are constantly being moved, reorganised, digitised, studied and reinterpreted. And ultimately, they have to be cared for.
Seeing the museum through Tanzanian eyes
Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the week was the way our colleagues from UDSM responded to the collections. It is easy for those of us who work in a large museum to become accustomed to things that are actually extraordinary.
A drawer full of African mammals? Normal. A room containing thousands of specimens? Normal. A century-old specimen with a handwritten label? Normal.
But watching someone encountering these things for the first time can be a useful reminder of just how remarkable they are. And the reverse is also true. Seeing collections through the eyes of colleagues from Tanzania raises questions for those of us in London. Why are so many African specimens here? What were the circumstances in which they were collected? What stories do the labels tell? What information is missing? Who should be able to access these collections? How can institutions in Africa and Europe work together to ensure that the scientific value of these collections is shared? These are not easy questions. But they are exactly the questions that need to be asked if natural history museums are going to remain relevant in the twenty-first century.
More than specimens
The week wasn't just about the Natural History Museum. The itinerary included visits to the Zoological Society of London, the British Museum, the Natural History Museum's molecular and digitisation facilities. There was also a visit to the collections and exhibition spaces at Tring. Each visit added another piece to the puzzle.
At the NHM, the group saw molecular collection facilities with Heather Avrili, digitisation with Arianna Salli, molecular facilities with Elena Lugli. They then met Jessica Bradford, Director of Collections. This was particularly important for the Hazina project. A modern natural history collection is no longer simply about jars, drawers and cabinets. It is also about: DNA. Digitisation. Imaging. Databases. Data sharing. New analytical techniques.
And the skills needed to bring all of these things together. For UDSM, developing these connections is potentially transformative.
Crossing the road to the British Museum
The visit to the British Museum brought another dimension into the discussion. Zoe Cormack, Curator for Africa, is involved in a major collaborative research and education programme looking at cultural belongings and artworks removed from Eastern and Central Africa during the nineteenth century. For the UDSM visitors, this broadened the conversation beyond zoological specimens. Natural history collections do not exist in isolation. They sit within a much larger history of collecting, exploration, colonialism, scientific research and cultural exchange. Understanding that history is increasingly important. It also creates opportunities for new collaborations between natural history museums, universities, historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and communities.
A little bit of London
Of course, you cannot bring colleagues from Tanzania to London for a week and expect them to spend every waking hour looking at specimen drawers. There had to be some London. And there was. The photographs from the trip capture some of those moments particularly well: the group outside the museum, travelling around London, visiting some of the city's famous landmarks and, inevitably, finding time for food and conversation. There is something very enjoyable about watching scientists temporarily abandon collection catalogues and become tourists.
The Natural History Museum itself was followed by the sights of London, and the UDSM team also had a free day to explore the city independently.
Collaborations are ultimately built between people, not institutions.
And then to Tring
The group headed to Tring, with collection tours and a visit to the exhibition space before continuing towards Stansted. The Tring collections provide another perspective on the scale and history of natural history collecting. By this point in the week, the UDSM team had seen enough different parts of the museum world to begin joining the dots. The question was no longer simply: "What does the Natural History Museum have?" It had become: "What could we do with collections like these in Tanzania?"
And that is a much more interesting question.
What does the future of natural history collections look like?
This, ultimately, was what the week was about. Natural history collections are often described as historical resources. But that description can be misleading. They are historical and contemporary. A specimen collected in 1910 might provide information about biodiversity in 2026. A bird collected decades ago might contain genetic information relevant to today's research. An old locality label might provide evidence of a habitat that has since disappeared. A collection that has sat quietly in a cabinet for a century might suddenly become relevant to a new scientific question. This is why projects such as Hazina matter.
The aim is not simply to rescue old collections or make museums look tidy. It is about ensuring that collections are alive with possibility. That means good storage. It means accurate documentation. It means trained curators. It means digitisation. It means access. It means partnerships. And it means ensuring that scientists in the countries from which specimens originated can play a central role in studying and interpreting them.
Bringing the knowledge home
For the UDSM colleagues, perhaps the most valuable thing about the visit was not any single specimen or laboratory. It was seeing how many different people are required to keep a major natural history collection functioning. Curators. Collection managers. Digitisation specialists. Molecular scientists. Researchers. Conservators. Data specialists. Historians. Educators.
And, increasingly, people thinking about the ethics and histories of collections. That is an important lesson for the development of natural history collections in Tanzania. There is no single solution. Collections need people with different skills working together. And they need strong relationships between institutions.
The last day
By Friday, the week was coming to an end. There was still time for the BBC World Service recording meeting Monica Whitlock from BBC World. Final sightseeing and a last look around London before the team headed back towards the airport.
After a week of museums, collections, laboratories, meetings, trains, cars, planes and quite a lot of walking, there was probably a certain relief at finally sitting down. Although knowing scientists, there was almost certainly still some discussion about specimens. Visits like this can sometimes look deceptively simple from the outside.
The important thing is what happens afterwards. The conversations continue. Ideas travel back to Tanzania. New research projects develop. Students meet potential supervisors and collaborators. Curators exchange knowledge. Collections are compared. Problems are discussed. And gradually, institutions begin to work together in ways that would have been difficult to imagine a few years earlier.
For the Hazina project, that is perhaps the most important outcome of all. The Natural History Museum has enormous collections, built over centuries. The University of Dar es Salaam has its own collections, researchers, students and a direct connection to the biodiversity of Tanzania. Putting those things together creates something neither institution can achieve alone.
Tanzania is one of the world's great centres of biodiversity, and its forests, mountains, wetlands and savannahs contain species that scientists are still discovering and trying to understand. The specimens held in museums are part of that story. They are records of what lived where. They are evidence of change. They are material links to the history of scientific exploration. And they can become powerful tools for conservation.
The visit of colleagues from the University of Dar es Salaam was therefore much more than a tour of the Natural History Museum.
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