The elaborate, Romanesque bulk of London’s Natural History Museum can be, and often is, read as a response to the existential crisis provoked by Darwin’s Origin of Species. The museum was commissioned in 1864, five years after the work’s publication. Victorian culture desperately needed to replace the certainty of biblical creation and the comforting presence of God with something new to wonder at and, in evolution, in nature, it found it.

This vast pile, crawling with terracotta creatures in place of bosses and gargoyles, expresses the realisation of nature as the product not of divine creation but of a scientifically describable – if astonishingly complex – process.