Tickets for the British Museum

Highlights & Description

There are eight million artifacts in the British Museum's unbelievable collection, making this enormous museum a London must-see. Join a guide and get an in-depth tour as you find out what makes the highlights so special. See the Rosetta Stone, Egyptian mummies, and stand in the museum's Great Court—the largest covered square in Europe.

The British Museum is a perfect place for a bit of treasure hunting! Your expert guide will take you on a tour through some of the museum's most incredible objects, which represent human history, achievement, culture and art across almost two million years.

See the incredible Rosetta Stone. Dating from 196 BC, this mysterious item contains three different scripts and is the key to helping modern scholars translate Ancient Egyptian language. Witness the original Greek sculptures from the front of the Parthenon in Athens, a 2,500-year-old temple dedicated to the Greek goddess Athena. Check out some of the museum's 140mummies and coffins, including the 3,500-year-old tomb of a pharaoh, Nubkheperre Intef, who ruled in Egypt's 17th dynasty around 1600 BC.

There's so much to uncover, and after your tour you're free to stay inside and carry on exploring!

Instructions

•Show your smartphone ticket to the guide at the meeting point, at the group entrance of the British Museum on Montague Place, WC1E 7JW, London.

•Please arrive at least 15 minutes before departure time at 11:00. No refunds or re-bookings can be provided for late arrivals or no-shows after the tour starts.

Amendment Policy

•Changes may be possible for this ticket.

What's included

Guided tour with a professional guide.

What's not included

Hotel pick-up & drop-off.

“A unique story of connection” is how South African filmmaker and naturalist Craig Foster refers to his underwater adventures with a wild common octopus documented in the film My Octopus Teacher.

The Netflix film shows the bond that develops between Foster and the eight-legged creature during a year of diving in a kelp forest in the Atlantic Ocean. It won this year’s Academy Award and British Academy Film and Television Arts Award for best documentary.

My Octopus Teacher has captured hearts worldwide because few of the many wonderful natural-history films are about a human’s relationship with the wild. “I think people around the world are longing to have some kind of real connection with the natural world, and this film speaks to that need,” Foster said.

He said he had many such experiences with nature, like having a fish swim into his hand or an otter swim with him and reach out and touch him. Still, he said, these strong bonds weren’t easily created often requiring years of tireless efforts. And he said he learned many lessons from the San masters, native people of South Africa’s Kalahari region. “They taught me to track on land and to look for signs. I applied those same lessons to looking in the water,” he said, “Tracking involves knowing the animals well and recognizing their behavior and movements.”

Observing his special octopus, part of a species known for its intelligence, has been a life-changing experience for Foster. One of the most remarkable moments was when the creature that initially hid in cracks allowed him to join her on a hunting expedition. How does Foster account for this? “When the same animal interacts with you every day over a long period of time, you can assume that there is trust involved.”

Foster said he learned that you can’t force this trust. “Everything must happen at the animal’s pace, comfort and convenience. In their eyes, we are big and aggressive, posing a threat to them. They make themselves vulnerable in allowing us into their space because trusting the wrong human could mean death. So it’s an immense privilege when they show trust.”

A major new facility to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere started operating in Iceland on Wednesday. The carbon capturing plant is the biggest of its kind, its builder says, increasing global capacity for the technology by more than 40 percent. Many climate experts say that efforts to suck CO₂ out of the air will be key to making the world carbon neutral(碳中和)in the coming decades.

By 2050, humanity will need to pull nearly a billion metric tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere every year through direct air capture technology to achieve carbon neutral goals according to International Energy Agency recommendations in 2021. The plant in Iceland will be able to capture 4,000 metric tons annually—just a tiny amount of what will be necessary, but it can grow rapidly as efficiency improves and costs decrease.

For now, the plant in Iceland is an unlikely global protector. Human-sized fans are built into boxes that are the size of standard 40-foot shipping containers. They sip CO₂ out of the air, catching it in sponge-like filters(过滤器). The filters are heated at a high temperature needed to boil water freeing the gas. Then it combines with water to produce a mixture, which is pumped deep underground, where over time it cools down and turns into dark-gray stone.

Pumping CO₂ into the ground is just one way to dispose of it. It can also go to other uses, as well. Energy companies can mix the carbon dioxide with hydrogen to make fuel. Farmers can feed their plants with it. Soda manufacturers can use it to make their drinks bubble when there is a carbonation shortage.

At the moment, the costs are high: about $600 to $800 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, Gebald, the cofounder of Climeworks, said far from the levels around $100 to $150 per ton that are necessary to turn a profit without any financial help of the government. In the long term, Gebald thinks prices will be half that by the late 2030s—about the price where it will be a competitive method of reducing global emissions.