Science Museum Group
group of science museums in the United Kingdom
The Science Museum Group (SMG) is a consortium consisting of the Science Museum in South Kensington, London, the Science and Industry Museum (SIM) in Manchester, the National Railway Museum (NRM) in York, Locomotion in County Durham, and the National Science and Media Museum (NSMM) in Bradford. Items in the SMG's collection that are not on display are usually stored at the Science and Innovation Park (SIP) in Wroughton, Wiltshire.
History
The origins of SMG lie in the internationalisation and optimism of the Great Exhibition of 1851, which enabled the foundation of the South Kensington Museum in 1857.
The term "National Museum of Science and Industry" had been in use as the Science Museum's subtitle since the early 1920s. Prior to 1 April 2012 the group was known as the National Museum of Science and Industry (NMSI).
The NSMM, formerly the National Media Museum, was established by the Science Museum in 1983. The Science Museum was run directly by HM Government until 1984, when the Board of Trustees was established and NMSI was then adopted as a corporate title for the entire organisation. At this point NMSI became a non-departmental public body under the auspices of the sponsoring government department, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
From January 2012 SIP became part of the SMG. From 2017 Locomotion, The National Railway Museum at Shildon, became part of the SMG.
In 2010 the Science Museum opened its climate science gallery Atmosphere which, as at April 2021, has been visited by over 5 million people. In 2021 the Science Museum also opened a temporary exhibition 'Our Future Planet' which explores the science of carbon capture.
“Science Museum Group” enters the record as group of science museums in the United Kingdom. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Science, Museum and Group can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7433571. VIAF identifies the subject as 294876747. The Library of Congress control number is n00077604. Authority coordinates are 51.498, -0.174. 2 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1851, 1857, 2012 and 1983.
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This entry incorporates text from “Science Museum Group” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.