An audio guide to the Natural History Museum London — mapped on-site by the Musa team, layered with our own techniques on top of the best of every official guide. Start in Hintze Hall and follow your curiosity.
Launching soon~90 minEnglish
FAQ
How long is the audio guide?
The full route takes about 90 minutes. You can pause and resume anywhere — the guide adapts to where you are in the museum.
Where do I start?
Hintze Hall — under Hope, the blue whale skeleton. From there, the guide branches by gallery so you can follow your curiosity rather than a fixed loop.
Do I need wifi?
Yes — the guide adapts to where you are and what you ask in real time, so it needs a connection. The Natural History Museum has free public wifi throughout the building; most visitors run the guide on that, and your mobile data works as a fallback if you wander into a patchy corner.
Is the museum entry included?
No — general admission to the Natural History Museum is free. The Musa guide is a separate product that runs on your phone alongside your visit.
We went to the Natural History Museum in person. We mapped the space the same way we do for the museums we work with around the world — gallery by gallery, vitrine by vitrine, photographing every label, noting which specimens reward a thirty-second pause and which deserve five minutes.
Then we read everything else. The official audio guide. Every well-known third-party tour. The TripAdvisor highlights, the BBC features, the academic monographs the curators have published, the Wikipedia rabbit holes. We pulled the best of all of it into one document and threw out anything that was filler.
Then we used our own techniques on top of that — the same techniques we use to build the AI guides our museum partners ship — to turn it into something you can actually live inside for ninety minutes without it ever feeling like homework.
What it's like
You start in Hintze Hall, under Hope, the 25-metre blue whale skeleton suspended over the room. The first chapter is short — a setup, a few facts you didn't know, and a choice. From there the guide branches by gallery, so two visitors who started together at 10 a.m. can be in completely different parts of the museum by 10:30 and the guide still makes sense.
We weave history, science, and the small human stories — the Victorian collectors, the curators who hid specimens during the Blitz, the discoveries that overturned what we thought we knew — through the objects in front of you. It's spatial: the guide knows roughly where you are and what you're looking at, and it picks the next thing to say accordingly.
If something grabs you, you can ask it to go deeper. If you've got fifteen minutes left and you want a tight loop through the highlights, it'll give you that instead.
A short teaser
Hope wasn't always called Hope. For most of her life she was just "the blue whale." She got the name in 2017, when the museum moved her into Hintze Hall as a deliberate symbol — the blue whale was almost hunted to extinction, and is now slowly recovering. So when you stand under her, you're standing under an argument the museum is making about what conservation can do, given enough time and the right decisions. Walk a few steps to the left. The next thing we'd like to show you is much smaller, and it's about the moment we realised the world was much older than we thought…
Practical
Bring headphones. Charge your phone. The guide is built for phones — earbuds in one ear if you want to talk to whoever you're with.
We'd recommend the Cromwell Road entrance and a weekday morning if you can — fewer school groups, more space to actually look. The full guide is one ticket; you can come back the next day on the same purchase.
We're going to keep adding to this guide as we revisit. If a new exhibition opens or we spot something better to say in a gallery we already covered, we'll quietly update it.
