Cuming Museum

The Cuming Museum began with a singular, childhood obsession. In the late eighteenth century, five-year-old Richard Cuming received a handful of fossils and a coin from a family friend, sparking a collecting habit that would last his entire life. Rather than traveling the globe to find treasures, Richard and his son, Henry Syer Cuming, stayed in London and scoured auction houses to build what would become a vast, idiosyncratic cabinet of curiosities. By the time the collection was bequeathed to the public in 1902, it had grown into a massive assemblage of natural history, archaeology, and everyday oddities.