Does the Natural History Museum have an audio guide?
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the Natural History Museum in London have an audio guide?
Yes. The Natural History Museum has free audio guides for several galleries, delivered via SoundCloud on your own phone. The flagship is a 24-track Hintze Hall tour narrated by Sir David Attenborough. There is no handset rental and no official museum app.
Is the Natural History Museum audio guide free?
Yes. All official NHM audio content is free to stream on SoundCloud or download as MP3 transcripts from nhm.ac.uk. No account or ticket upgrade is required.
How do I get the Natural History Museum audio guide?
Open SoundCloud and search for 'nhmlondon,' or visit the gallery page on nhm.ac.uk where the player is embedded. Transcripts and MP3 downloads are also available. Bring headphones.
Is there a Natural History Museum London app?
No. The museum does not publish a visitor-facing mobile app. Apps branded 'Natural History Museum 4 You' or 'Museum Buddy' are third-party products from Trishti Systems and are not affiliated with the museum.
Is 'Our Story with David Attenborough' the audio guide?
No. 'Our Story with David Attenborough' is a separate ticketed 50-minute immersive projection experience in the Jerwood Gallery, £20 to £25 per adult. The free Attenborough audio is the Hintze Hall tour on SoundCloud.
Technically, yes. The Natural History Museum publishes free audio for several galleries. But calling it an "audio guide" is generous. There is no app, no handset rental, no QR codes in the galleries, and no signage telling you it exists. The audio lives on SoundCloud. You open a music streaming app on your phone, search for the right playlist, and press play. There is no map, no routing between rooms, and no way to search for the specimen you are standing in front of.
The flagship piece is a 24-track Hintze Hall tour narrated by David Attenborough, recorded in 2018 and not updated since (it still refers to a former director as current). Additional free tracks cover the Evolution Garden (39 tracks), Nature Discovery Garden (33 tracks), Volcanoes and Earthquakes (16 tracks), and fragments for Treasures, Human Evolution, and Wildlife Photographer of the Year. The Dinosaurs gallery, the most visited room in the building, has no audio guide at all. Everything is English only.
Most visitors never find any of this. The most-played Hintze Hall track has 42,000 plays across eight years, against roughly 6 million annual visitors. That is not an underused gem. That is a product with a discoverability problem and a format problem.
What does the official audio guide actually cover?
The museum has published audio in pieces rather than as one unified tour. The largest single set is Hintze Hall, which covers the blue whale "Hope," the giraffes, blue marlin, Mantellisaurus, the Imilac meteorite, the architecture, and the six cabinets along the balconies (Explorers, Collectors, Founders, Preparators, Thinkers, plus the ceiling panels). Each stop runs roughly two minutes and pairs scripted narration with a short interview with an NHM curator. Played end to end, it takes about 45 to 55 minutes.
The gardens, which reopened in July 2024, got their own dedicated audio. The Evolution Garden guide has 39 tracks and runs about an hour. The Nature Discovery Garden has 33. Both include spoken-word poetry from The Poetry Group and described-navigation tracks for blind and partially-sighted visitors. Volcanoes and Earthquakes got a 16-track guide in January 2026, running about 40 minutes. Human Evolution has a single embedded audio file on its gallery page, with a warning from the museum that "some changes have been made to the gallery that aren't reflected in this guide." Older galleries like Creepy Crawlies have scattered legacy tracks.
Is the audio guide free?
Yes. Every piece of official NHM audio is free to stream. The accessibility page puts it plainly: "All our audio content is available for free, and you can listen to it on your personal devices either here at the Museum or at home." You do not need an account, a ticket upgrade, or a paid app. For more on this, see is nhm audio guide free.
How do you get the audio guide?
Open SoundCloud in a browser or the SoundCloud app and search for "nhmlondon," or go directly to the playlist URL for the gallery you want. The museum also embeds the players on nhm.ac.uk pages and publishes full transcripts next to each one. MP3 downloads are available from the transcript pages if you want to listen offline. There is no physical handset to pick up and no kiosk. Step-by-step walkthrough here: how to download nhm audio guide.
Is there a Natural History Museum app?
No. The museum has not published a visitor-facing mobile app. The "Natural History Museum London" app you might see in the App Store returns no metadata when queried, and the app listings branded "Natural History Museum 4 You" or "Museum Buddy" are all from a third-party publisher called Trishti Systems. They rate 1.6 stars on Google Play across 273 reviews. The museum's only active mobile products are a retired Fossil Explorer citizen-science app and an internal research tool called DSML. For visitors, the sanctioned channels are SoundCloud and nhm.ac.uk.
What about the paid audio guides I keep seeing on Viator and GetYourGuide?
Those are third-party products, not NHM's. WeGoTrip, Vox City, Headout, Wanderung, and LondonBillets all sell "Natural History Museum audio tours" starting around £3.70 and going up to about £11. Ratings are mixed (2.7 to 4.6 stars), several use AI-generated voices, and a few reviewers on LondonBillets and Wanderung allege outright scams. Entry to the museum is free, so the paid tours are not saving you a ticket line, they are just selling audio you could get for nothing from SoundCloud. Breakdown here: nhm vs viator audio tours.
Is this the same as "Our Story with David Attenborough"?
No, and this is the most common mix-up. "Our Story with David Attenborough" is a separate ticketed experience in the Jerwood Gallery, opened in June 2025 and extended through August 2026. It is a 50-minute 360-degree projection-mapped cinema piece, not an audio tour. Adult tickets are £20 to £25. Attenborough narrates both products, which is where the confusion comes from. If you want the free Attenborough audio, that is the Hintze Hall tour on SoundCloud. Fuller comparison: our story attenborough vs audio guide.
Practical notes from visiting
Bring headphones. The galleries are loud (Hintze Hall especially on weekends), and playing audio out loud is frowned on. Signal can be patchy in the dinosaur gallery and in the basement, so download tracks before you go if you want to be safe. The Hintze Hall audio references Sir Michael Dixon as "today's Director," which dates the recording (he stepped down in 2021). The Evolution Garden guide is the most recent and best-produced of the set, but it is still a SoundCloud playlist with no in-app navigation.
Should you bother?
If you have 45 minutes to spend in Hintze Hall, yes. If you are moving through the museum quickly with kids, the audio is probably too slow-paced to hold their attention and you will get more out of just walking around. For visitors wanting a structured tour of the full museum, the official audio does not exist, the third-party apps are uneven, and most people end up using the free museum map plus whatever catches their eye.
We build AI audio guides for museums. If you are researching options for your visit, the free NHM SoundCloud is the right place to start. If you are a curator reading this and wondering what a modern multilingual version might look like, musa.guide is where we write about that work.
