The British Museum was founded in 1753, making it the world's first public national museum, and it opened its doors in 1759 to anyone who cared to walk in, free of charge.

It stands on the site of Montagu House, a neglected Bloomsbury mansion that beat out Buckingham House (later Buckingham Palace) for the honour, partly on grounds of price. The building you see today, with its famous collonaded facade, was designed by Robert Smirke and completed in the 1840s; its celebrated circular Reading Room is where Karl Marx drafted Das Kapital and Virginia Woolf gathered the thoughts that became A Room of One's Own.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours use the British Museum as a landmark of convergence, tracing the threads of empire, abolition and literary Bloomsbury that all arrive, eventually, at these steps.