Creature comforts | The Grant Museum of Zoology, University College London

The renovation of a beloved museum is always a daunting task. It is a tricky balancing act trying to keep popular displays and favourite specimens while updating tired ones and telling new stories.

This is a particular problem at natural history museums, where the never-ending process of scientific research means that the interpretation of any specimen could change overnight.

The Grant Museum of Zoology at University College London (UCL) has tackled this challenge head-on as part of a £300,000 renovation, choosing to prioritise continuity over change.

Heading into the museum’s main exhibition space, you’d be hard-pressed to know anything was different. The giant deer by the door is still present, the skeletons still stare down on you from the upper level, and the Micrarium still highlights thousands of microscopic organisms.

It is a far cry from the previous renovation, which saw the Grant Museum close its doors for around nine months as it migrated around the corner from its former home in UCL’s Darwin Building to its current one in the Rockefeller Building.

This time round, the museum was closed for nearly 11 months to introduce six new showcases, hundreds of new labels and move thousands of specimens.

None of these changes are immediately obvious to a visitor, the renovation having done an excellent job of integrating them into the display space. In fact, if you hadn’t visited before, it’s only the modernity of the cases around the entrance and front desk that might suggest they hadn’t always been there.

These cases are part of the focus of the renovations, displaying specimens and items that demonstrate that natural history museums aren’t just catalogues of life on Earth, but are part of cutting-edge work shaping how we understand it.

From a splatometer used to record insect abundance to a sound recorder for monitoring frogs, the displays fulfil the promise to “showcase how UCL research is responding to the planetary environmental crisis”.

Elsewhere in the museum, the cases and displays are broadly the same as before. They’re still pleasingly stuffed with specimens that hark back to the curiosity cabinet predecessors of natural history museums.

One such curio, an unfortunate opossum discovered with a D-cell battery in its body during conservation work, feels like it would have been right at home in such a display.

While the cabinets may be relatively full, they’re not so packed that visitors are unable to appreciate each skeleton, model or piece of taxidermy individually.

A number of different specimens now have new labels to help with this, highlighting their connection to the biodiversity and climate crises taking place in our world.

There’s also some acknowledgement of the impact that colonialism has had on the natural world and the legacy it has left in institutions such as the Grant Museum itself.

These are welcome additions, certainly, but don’t quite deliver on UCL’s pledge to “tell a story of the human impact on the diversity of life on Earth”. There is no through-line or central thesis to the display, just a series of specimens placed together.

In this respect, it’s disappointing that the renovation of the Grant Museum hasn’t changed more. While there may not have been the scope or budget to do so, the layout remains something of an issue.

For instance, though the effect of the cases stretching all the way up the walls is just as charming as before, there are still labels sitting in them that presumably have never been read.

A visitor might just be able to make out the title in some of the lower wall displays, but there’s no hope of identifying what is in the top cases. For these exhibits, it might have been useful to place the labels separately on a nearby wall or to provide some other way to get this information across.

The layout of the exhibition space at ground level also poses something of a challenge for visitors with wheelchairs and pushchairs.

While the Grant Museum is fully accessible, and these visitors can negotiate their way around all the exhibits, it can get cramped in the outer ring of cases. This means wheelchairs and pushchairs might have difficulties passing other visitors, and vice versa.

However, although it’s an unfortunate situation, the historic nature of the cases may mean there’s little that can be done to improve it.

Returning to labelling, however, there are small issues that would have been – and could be – relatively easy to address. Though it’s not feasible to replace all the labels in one go, it might have been worth going through the older ones again.

The label for the modern human skull, for instance, describes the earliest known anatomically modern humans as having lived between 150,000 to 200,000 years ago.

Research published in 2017, however, pushed this back by around 50,000 years, so it is a shame the renovation hasn’t been able to reflect changes in scientific thought like this.

There is also a case that shows a series of beautiful models of the developmental stages of a leech. At the time of my visit, however, there wasn’t a typed label to explain them – just a hard-to-read, handwritten collections label.

Whether the renovation of the Grant Museum has been a success or not ultimately depends on what a visitor wants out of it. If you’re looking for a continuation of the museum’s previous incarnation, then you’ll be delighted.

The conservation work, new cases and interpretation all add to the exhibits rather than detract from them, while the charms that make the Grant Museum a great family visit are all here in abundance.

Indeed, there were plenty of children happily taking part in activities, roaming the space, and discovering the jar of moles for the first time.

For those less enamoured with the museum, however, many of the same frustrations from its previous layout are still evident.

In the end, the renovation of the Grant Museum is a perfectly fine one, but one where the spectre of what could have been looms large over the result.

James Ashworth is the digital content producer (news) at the Natural History Museum, London