ABSTRACT
The majority of visitors to the British Museum still enter via the monumental South Entrance designed by the architect Robert Smirke, as they have for the past 160 years. Inside the museum, the exhibition galleries continue to invoke the familiar choreography of walking, looking, reading, talking, listening and occasionally sitting that people have seen being enacted and imitated by museum bodies since the eighteenth century. The British Museum remains open to everyone, free of charge. It also continues to calibrate its audience in terms of age and class, as well as ethnicity and health. The museum's annual reports include attendance figures for each of these categories of visitors, in accordance with demographic targets agreed with the UK government Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). Museum bodies, the British Museum scene in Maurice reminds us that the institution can never predict or manage the diverse and private social and physical encounters that it accommodates.
