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…
reviewed
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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 inter…
reviewed
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C
National Football Museum
It's the world's most popular game and Manchester is home to the world's most popular team, so when this museum went looking for a new home (from its previous location in the stand of Preston North End Football Club [FC], winners of the first professional league championship in 1889), it made sense that it would find its way to the stunning glass triangle that is Urbis. Slated to open in 2011, the museum will be a major stop in the football fan's Manchester pilgrimage and promises a major revamp of the displays exhibited in Preston. There'll be the usual array of footy memorabilia as well as a host of interactive, multimedia displays that will (hopefully) explain the game…
reviewed
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D
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.
reviewed
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E
Imperial War Museum North
War museums generally appeal to those with a fascination for military hardware and battle strategy (toy soldiers optional), 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.
The exhibits cover the main conflicts of the 20th century through a broad selection of displays, but the really effective bit comes every half-hour when the entire exhibition hall goes dark and one of three 15-minute films (Children and War, The War at Home or Weapons of War) is projected throughout. Visitors are encouraged to walk around the darkened room so as to get the…
reviewed
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F
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.
reviewed
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G
Museum of the Greater Manchester Police
One of the city's best-kept secrets is this superb museum housed within a former Victorian police station. The original building has been magnificently – if a little creepily – brought back to life, and you can wander in and out of 19th-century cells where prisoners rested their heads on wooden (!!) pillows; visit a restored magistrates' court from 1895; and examine the case histories (complete with mugshots and photos of weapons) of some of the more notorious names to have passed through its doors.
reviewed
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H
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 exhibits…
reviewed
