Benedict Cumberbatch, Jude Law, and More Celebrate at the British Museum Ball

In the days before the second annual British Museum Ball,, there was plenty of chatter about the event: who would be there; what everyone would be wearing; how exactly the artist Es Devlin would transform the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, said to be the largest enclosed room in Europe. It helped that Frieze London and Frieze Masters opened Wednesday, injecting a jolt of art mania into Regent’s Park. Then on Friday came the news that the British Museum had received a gift of £30 million (around $40 million) from “a single, long-standing supporter,” money independent of the funds being raised by the gala that would go to support renovations known as the Masterplan—a massive undertaking a press release described as “one of the greatest cultural redevelopment projects being undertaken anywhere in the world.”

As the ball began Saturday, 850 figures from the worlds of art, fashion, film and British society arrived in Bloomsbury—including London Mayor Sadiq Khan, a co-chair of the event, and Mick Jagger, who took the stage at the event to proclaim, “All of us here tonight are the custodians of this wonderful museum. We hope to continue and inspire generations of artists, inventors, historians and new Mozarts.” (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart famously visited the British Museum when he was a nine-year-old prodigy, presenting the institution with a motet he composed, in English, while in London.) Benedict Cumberbatch and Jude Law were also on hand. The two stars performed a version of “Letters Live,” an epistolary routine in which each actor read from a series of correspondence.