Thinking Outside The Box - Butterfly House at the Horniman Museum and Gardens, London

The Horniman Museum and Gardens in Forest Hill, South London, was founded in 1901 by tea trader and philanthropist Frederick Horniman.

Over recent years the Museum has been engaged in a significant change programme to become more enterprising – creatively maximising its assets and growing and diversifying its income, through the strategic development of a range of charged-for products and services.

In August 2017, the Horniman became even more compelling as a visitor attraction with the introduction of a Butterfly House – a glasshouse structure located in the Museum’s16 acres of gardens. It provides visitors the opportunity to experience hundreds of beautiful butterflies in a tropical indoor garden. The specially-planted habitat with more than 60 exotic plant species is the perfect place to experience free-flying butterflies and to discover amazing facts about their life-cycle and behaviour.

The Butterfly House has been a hugely popular attraction that has generated more than £450,000 since opening and ensured that visitors numbers at the museum did not decline whilst two galleries were closed for refurbishment for 18 months until June 2018.
The Butterfly House is also the perfect complement to the Museum’s existing Natural History and Living collections, sitting comfortably with its core charitable purpose and mission and championing environmental and biodiversity messages.

The Butterfly House is managed by the museum’s existing Aquarium and Animal Walk team, taking advantage of their expertise in animal husbandry, and the planting was designed, developed and is now tended by the Gardens team. It also encourages visitors to venture outdoors and explore a less visited area of the estate, in turn easing congestion inside the Museum.