Skip to main content
KBS_Icon_questionmark link-ico

Outreach

The Museum uses its range of expertise and specimens to promote the Life Sciences to communities outside King’s College and especially to local schools with which it has special links.

The Museum also runs special lectures and workshops for teachers as part of their continuing professional development.

Museum of Life Sciences Outreach

School’s Liaison

Pupils and staff come to the museum for tours, practical workshops, lectures and seminars that all make use of the Museum’s huge variety of specimens. Lively discussions are part of the Museum visit and pupils enjoy the opportunity to get hands-on experience of the specimens.

Sessions for pupils have included:

  • Microscopy – a consideration of the principals of light and electron microscopy with use of museum slides for practice in using a microscope.
  • Limbs, Levers and Locomotion –the physics of simple levers and how various vertebrate limbs are adapted to create high force or high velocity.
  • Natural Selection – Darwin’s theory of Evolution through Natural Selection as illustrated by a variety of specimens in the Museum.
  • Animal Athletes – run a spart of the ‘Scientists in Sport’ workshops organised by the School of Biomedical Sciences in association with Glaxo SmithKline.

Outreach to the wider community

The Museum is visited by potential students and their parents and other groups by arrangement. A small group of artists regularly come to the museum to depict specimens in different media.

In the summer of 2011 the Museum was involved in a local community scheme to produce a temporary urban ‘Pop-up’ Physic Garden in a derelict site near to the Guy’s Campus of King’s College.

Photographs of some of the Museum’s Pharmacy Herbarium specimens were included in the garden. The Museum also hosted sessions on plants of medicinal interest and their products in which the Professor of Pharmacognacy at King’s College discussed the uses and abuses of plant materials and how medications such as pills were made from plant material. These sessions were open to the public (with prior booking).

Contact the Museum

The Museum is open to members of the college and their invited guests during the opening hours of the Gordon Museum. We regret that the Museum is not currently accesible to the public, but we do plan to open to the public in future when funding allows. Visits by academically-related non-members of the College can be arranged with the Curator. The Museum is situated in the Hodgkin Building, on the Guy’s Site of King’s College. It is close to London Bridge underground and mainline stations and is well served by buses. Access is via the Gordon Museum, Hodgkin Building unless by prior agreement when non-step access direct from the Memorial Garden in the centre of the site can be arranged.

Museum of Life Sciences, Hodgkin Building, Guy's Campus, London SE1 1UL