147
bought all the houses surrounding it, knocked them all down and built over
them. In 1939, just before
the start of World War II, most of the Museum's
exhibits were taken to other places because the directors were worried
the Nazismight bomb the Museum during the Blitz. The exhibits were stored
in old London Underground stations, as well as other places.
The evacuation
proved to be a good idea, as parts of the Museum were destroyed by bombs in
1940.
Much of the 1950s was spent fixing the parts of the Museum destroyed
by the bombing, and bringing back the pieces that had been taken away.
During all this time the collection continued to get bigger, although space was
slowly running out for all the books being brought in. The British Library was
set up in 1973 to deal with this problem.
In 1972
the Museum
was loaned the Tutankhamun collection from the Museum of Cairo. They
held a big exhibition called 'The Treasures of Tutankhamun' and it attracted
over 1.5 million people to come and see it.
In 1998 the central courtyard,
which had been unused before, was turned into
the Great Court with the
Reading Room at its centre. The Great Court has over 2 acres of space under
its roof. This makes it the largest covered public space in Europe.
[16]
It was
opened by Queen Elizabeth II in January 2000.
[16]
Since then the Museum has
collected more things to do with history, rather than more modern pieces.
They
now
have
a
large
collection
of Roman
British, Ancient
Greek and Ancient Egyptian artefacts, as well
as objects from many other
cultures and times around the world.
Because of its extremely large size the Museum's collection is split into
many parts, called
departments
. The departments have changed many times
over the years. They are sometimes merged together,
split into smaller
departments or renamed and changed altogether.
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