Museum sights in Manchester
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A
Museum Of Science & Industry
The city’s largest museum comprises 2.8 hectares in the heart of 19th-century industrial Manchester. It’s in the landscape of enormous, weather-stained brick buildings and rusting cast-iron relics of canals, viaducts, bridges, warehouses and market buildings that makes up Castlefield, now deemed an ‘urban heritage park’. If there’s anything you want to know about the Industrial (and post-Industrial) Revolution and Manchester’s key role in it, you’ll find the answers among the collection of steam engines and locomotives, factory machinery from the mills, and the excellent exhibition telling the story of Manchester from the sewers up. With more than a dozen permanent exhibi…
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B
People's History Museum
A major refurb of an Edwardian pumping station – including the construction of a striking new annexe – has resulted in the expansion of one of the city’s best museums, which is devoted to British social history and the labour movement. You clock in on the 1st floor (literally: punch your card in an old mill clock, which managers would infamously fiddle so as to make employees work longer) and plunge into the heart of Britain’s struggle for basic democratic rights, labour reform and fair pay. Amid displays like the (tiny) desk at which Thomas Paine (1737–1809) wrote Rights of Man (1791) and an array of beautifully made and colourful union banners are compelling interactive…
reviewed
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C
Urbis
The stunning glass triangle that is Urbis is a museum about how a city works and - often - doesn't work. The walls of the three floors are covered in compelling photographs, interesting statistics and informative timelines, but the best parts are the interactive videos, each of which tell stories about real people from radically different backgrounds and how they fare in Manchester.
It's all well and good to theorise, but there's nothing like a real story to hammer home the truth. Homelessness, rootlessness and dislocation are major themes of urban living, and Urbis doesn't shy away from encouraging visitors to consider what it's like to sleep on a park bench.
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D
Imperial War Museum North
War museums generally appeal to those with a fascination for military hardware and battle strategy, but Daniel Libeskind's visually stunning Imperial War Museum North takes a radically different approach. War is hell, it tells us, but it's a hell we revisit with tragic regularity. Although the audiovisuals and displays are quite compelling, the extraordinary aluminium-clad building itself is a huge part of the attraction, and the exhibition spaces are genuinely breathtaking. Libeskind designed three separate-but-linked structures, or shards, that represent the three main theatres of war: air, land and sea.
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E
Manchester Museum
If you’re into natural history and social science, this extraordinary museum is the place for you. It has galleries devoted to archaeology, archery, botany, ethnology, geology, numismatics and zoology. The real treat here, though, is the Egyptology section and its collection of mummies. One particularly interesting part is devoted to the work of Dr Richard Neave, who has rebuilt faces of people who have been dead for more than 3000 years; his pioneering techniques are now used in criminal forensics.
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F
Pankhurst Centre
The Pankhurst Centre is the converted childhood home of Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928), a leading light of the British suffragette movement. It has displays on her remarkable life and political struggles. The museum is on Nelson St, which marks the southern boundary of the University of Manchester and the northern side of the Manchester Infirmary.
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G
Manchester Jewish Museum
The Manchester Jewish Museum, in a Moorish-style former synagogue, tells the story of the city's Jewish community in fascinating detail, including the story of Polish refugee Michael Marks, who opened his first shop with partner Tom Spencer at 20 Cheetham Hill Rd in 1894. From Piccadilly Gardens, take bus 59, 89, 135 or 167.
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