Manchester Museum

Manchester Museum hopes to become the most inclusive, imaginative and caring museum you’ll ever visit. As one of the UK’s largest university museums, it has research and learning in its DNA, but now it’s aiming to build stronger emotional connections with visitors too, creating a space where everyone feels they belong.

Local and diverse stories spotlighted

Following a major transformation in 2022, Manchester Museum boasts a number of new galleries with local communities at its heart, including the South Asia Gallery, co-curated with 30 inspiring community members, the Lee Kai Hung Chinese Culture Gallery, and the Belonging Gallery, led by Alexandra P Alberda, the museum’s Curator of Indigenous Perspectives. The galleries explore important topics relevant to the city's communities, such as its connections to colonialism alongside language, sound, music, dance and more.

Leaders in learning and research

As a university museum, Manchester Museum has always been a place for collections-based research and learning. This is embedded in its new displays, from the dinosaur gallery which shows visitors 'how to think like a palaeontologist' to its world-leading conservation work done through its vivarium, which houses live amphibians and reptiles. It's the only place outside Panama where you’ll find the extraordinarily beautiful and critically endangered harlequin toad.

A space for everyone

Following a major redevelopment in 2023, they created new galleries and visitor spaces with collaboration and co-creation at their heart, including a prayer room, a quiet room, a therapy room, a gift shop and a café. And all of this is housed inside a spectacular neo-Gothic building in Manchester.