ABSTRACT
The Queen Elizabeth II Great Court of the British Museum was opened by the Queen on 6 December 2000 in the middle of a media controversy centred on the architects’ substitution of French for English limestone on the new south portico. At its height, the controversy threatened the demolition of the portico itself. As it turned out, it merely drew attention to the latent xenophobia in sections of the news media about cultural matters: the French stone being presented, as it were, as a foreign body at the heart of empire. Although the story is not important here per se, it is significant in terms of describing the culture in which the Court was built. In many respects it was a culture of fear: fear of the other, fear of the urban, fear of the monumental, fear of the public, fear of the city. All of these things were, one way or another, described by the Great Court. This was after all, an urban culture that seemed intent on denying its urbanity: the British Museum, the greatest monument to imperial culture had long been allowed to drift and deteriorate, and nowhere in the museum was this more clearly exemplified than in the original Great Court. Once one of the grandest of all nineteenth-century public spaces, it had become the rubble room of the museum, a jumble of temporary buildings and book stacks huddled around the old British Library, a metonym for the mess of the museum proper.
