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, you could spend a whole day poking about the place, testing early electric-shock machines here and trying out a printing press there. A unifying theme (besides the fact that science and industry were pretty handy to the development of society) is that Manchester and Mancunians had a key role to play: did you know that Manchester was home to the world’s first computer (a giant contraption called ‘the baby’), in 1948, or that the world’s first submarine was built to the designs of local curate Reverend George Garrett, in 1880? Nope, neither did we.