Museum sights in Northwest England
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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
Beatles Story
Liverpool's most popular museum won't illuminate any dark, juicy corners in the turbulent history of the world's most famous foursome – there's ne'er a mention of internal discord, drugs or Yoko Ono – but there's plenty of genuine memorabilia to keep a Beatles fan happy. Particularly impressive is the full-size replica Cavern Club (which was actually tiny) and the Abbey Rd studio where the lads recorded their first singles, while George Harrison's crappy first guitar (now worth half a million quid) should inspire budding, penniless musicians to keep the faith. The museum is also the departure point for the Yellow Duckmarine Tour.
reviewed
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C
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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D
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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E
Merseyside Maritime Museum
The story of one of the world's great ports is the theme of this excellent museum and, believe us, it's a graphic and compelling page-turner. One of the many great exhibits is Emigration to a New World, which tells the story of nine million emigrants and their efforts to get to North America and Australia; the walk-through model of a typical ship shows just how tough conditions on board really were.
reviewed
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F
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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G
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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H
World Museum Liverpool
Natural history, science and technology are the themes of this sprawling museum, whose exhibits range from birds of prey to space exploration. It also includes the country's only free planetarium. This vastly entertaining and educational museum is divided into four major sections: the Human World, one of the top anthropological collections in the country; the Natural World, which includes a new aquarium as well as live insect colonies; Earth, a geological treasure trove; and Space & Time, which includes the planetarium. Highly recommended.
reviewed
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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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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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National Conservation Centre
Ever wonder how art actually gets restored? Find out at this terrific conservation centre, housed in a converted railway goods depot. Hand-held audio wands help tell the story, but the real fun is actually attempting a restoration technique with your own hands. Sadly, our trembling paws weren't allowed near anything of value – that was left to the real experts, whose skills are pretty amazing.
reviewed
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Judges' Lodgings
Once the home of witch-hunter Thomas Covell (he who 'caught' the poor Pendle women), Lancaster's oldest town house, a Grade I–listed Georgian building, is now home to a Museum of Furnishings by master builders Gillows of Lancaster, whose work graces the Houses of Parliament. It also houses a Museum of Childhood, which has memorabilia from the turn of the 20th century.
reviewed
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Grosvenor Museum
Excellent museum with the country's most comprehensive collection of Roman tombstones. At the back of the museum is a preserved Georgian house, complete with kitchen, drawing room, bedroom and bathroom.
reviewed
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Combined Headquarters of the Western Approaches
The Combined Headquarters of the Western Approaches, the secret command centre for the Battle of the Atlantic, was abandoned at the end of the war with virtually everything left intact. You can get a good glimpse of the labyrinthine nerve centre of Allied operations.
reviewed
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Maritime Museum
The Maritime Museum, in the 18th-century Custom House, recalls the days when Lancaster was a flourishing port at the centre of the slave trade.
reviewed
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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
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R
Maritime Museum
The 18th-century Custom House recalls the days when Lancaster was a flourishing port at the centre of the slave trade.
reviewed
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S
Liverpool War Museum
The secret command centre for the Battle of the Atlantic, the Western Approaches, was abandoned at the end of the war with virtually everything left intact. You can get a good glimpse of the labyrinthine nerve centre of Allied operations, including the all-important map room, where you can imagine playing a real-life, full-scale version of Risk.
reviewed
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T
International Slavery Museum
Museums are, by their very nature, like a still of the past, but the extraordinary International Slavery Museum resonates very much in the present. It reveals slavery's unimaginable horrors – including Liverpool's own role in the triangular slave trade – in a clear and uncompromising manner. It does this through a remarkable series of multimedia and other displays, and it doesn't baulk at confronting racism, slavery's shadowy ideological justification for this inhumane practice.
The history of slavery is made real through a series of personal experiences, including a carefully kept ship's log and captain's diary. These tell the story of one slaver's experience on a typ…
reviewed
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Dewa Roman Experience
Walk through a reconstructed Roman street to reveal what Roman life was like. It's just off Bridge St.
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Bugworld Experience
Get up close and personal with 36 different species of bug and insect by clambering around six distinctive habitats; see the world from their eyes; and, for an extra special treat, sample some oven-baked tarantula, chilli locusts or a meal worm pancake. This is just part of the fun at this brand new interactive museum, which will surely have the kids pestering you to buy a book on insects and their funny habits when you're done.
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National Football Museum
This crowd-pleaser opened in 2001 and is home to a superb collection of football artefacts and archives. Appropriately, a visit to the hugely popular museum is 'a game of two halves': first the history of the game and the hall of fame, then the fun hands-on stuff. Bend it like Beckham with GoalStriker, an interactive penalty shoot-out experience.
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Harris Museum & Art Gallery
Situated inside a beautiful, custom-built building dating from 1893, the Harris Museum showcases Preston's rich heritage. Exhibitions cover local history and archaeology, fine art, photography, costume and decorative arts. Diversity rules here: highlights include a prehistoric elk skeleton and the country's largest collection of French perfume bottles.
reviewed
