Geological Museum

Built on a long narrow site with frontages in Piccadilly and Jermyn Street, that building housed the galleries, as well as a library, a 500-seat lecture theatre, offices and laboratories.

[6] The purpose of the museum, as summarised in the Descriptive Guide, published in 1867, was: to exhibit the rocks minerals, and organic remains, illustrating the maps and sections of the Geological Survey of the United Kingdom: also to exemplify the applications of the Mineral productions of these Islands to the uses of purposes of use and ornament[2]The collections were accordingly arranged in two main sections covering natural materials found in the United Kingdom, and industrial products made from them.

[7] The museum was reopened by the then Duke of York in July 1935, after the completion of the new building on Exhibition Road in South Kensington two years prior - it had housed the ill-starred World Economic Conference in June 1933, which had brought together the representatives of 66 nations in a failed effort to end the then-prevalent global depression.

It was opened by Queen Elizabeth II and became well known for the huge reproduction of a rock face, cast from site in Scotland, and for its planetarium, active volcano model and earthquake machine.

Treasures of the Earth was the first major museum gallery in the world to integrate computers presenting images and text adjacent to artefacts as part of the information process within the exhibition.

The central feature film, Liquid Assets, in the Oil and Gas exhibition was shot and viewed vertically from a circular gallery and won a major award from the IVCA in 1989.

That globe rotated around the escalator, with dramatic sound effects based on Jimi Hendrix's "Third Stone from the Sun", attempting to give an impression of the flux in the core of the Earth.