Manchester Museum

Oxford Road

Manchester Museum sits on Oxford Road, part of the University of Manchester's neo-Gothic campus, and if you walk past it without looking up, you will miss one of the most important museum buildings in the country. It was designed by Alfred Waterhouse, the same architect who gave London its Natural History Museum and Manchester its Town Hall. The current building was built between 1885 and 1888 and opened to the public in 1888, a Grade II listed Gothic Revival frontage that Waterhouse and later his son and grandson extended over the decades, including a pavilion in 1912 and a further wing in 1927.

It is a university museum, which means two things. First, the collections are extraordinary, because they have been built by academics over nearly two centuries. Second, most people in Manchester have never been in. University museums have a habit of feeling like they belong to the university rather than the city. Manchester Museum has spent the last decade trying to fix that, and the 2023 reopening was the loudest statement yet that this building belongs to everyone.

4.5 Million Things

The collections began in 1821 with the Manchester Society of Natural History, which had its premises on Peter Street. When the Society's finances collapsed, the collections were transferred to Owens College, the institution that eventually became the University of Manchester. It was Thomas Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, whose advice in 1867 persuaded Owens College to take on the collections. The museum was formally established that year and moved into Waterhouse's new building on Oxford Road when it opened in 1888.

What grew from there is staggering. The museum now holds about 4.5 million items from every continent on earth, making it the largest university museum in the UK. The entomology collection alone runs to nearly three million specimens, including over 10,500 type specimens, the reference examples against which all other specimens of a species are measured. The Manchester Herbarium contains over 950,000 botanical specimens. The bird collection holds around 15,000 study skins, including a warbler finch collected by Charles Darwin in the Galapagos in 1835. The mollusc collection is the fourth largest in Britain, with 166,000 lots. The geology collection holds over 9,000 mineral specimens and several hundred thousand fossils.

None of this is behind a paywall. The museum is free to enter. It has always been free to enter. Around 650,000 people walk through the doors every year, which makes it one of the most visited museums outside London. And yet, ask most Mancunians what is inside, and you will get a shrug. They know it is there. They walked past it on the way to a lecture, or on the way to the pub, or on the way to the curry mile. They never went in.

The Mummies

The Egyptology collection is the jewel. Jesse Haworth, a Manchester textile merchant, funded excavations in Egypt by Sir Flinders Petrie, the father of scientific archaeology. Finds from Kahun and Gurob were presented to the museum in 1890 by Haworth and Martyn Kennard. The 1912 pavilion that Waterhouse's son Paul built was funded by Haworth specifically to house the Egyptian and archaeological collections. The museum's first Egyptology keeper was Winifred M. Crompton, one of the earliest women to hold such a position in a British museum.

In 1908, Margaret Murray publicly unwrapped the Two Brothers, Khnum-Nakht and Nakht-Ankh, in this museum, the first woman to lead a mummy unwrapping in Britain. In 1973, Dr Rosalie David established the Egyptian Mummy Research Project here, and in 1975 her team unwrapped mummy number 1770, the first complete unwrapping since Murray's. From 1979, the project pioneered non-destructive techniques, using endoscopy and imaging to study mummies without damaging them. The museum became one of the leading centres for mummy research in the world, all from a Gothic building on Oxford Road. And in 2018, DNA testing on the Two Brothers showed they had the same mother but different fathers, solving a question that had been open for 110 years.

In June 2013, the museum made headlines for something stranger. A small Egyptian statuette of a man named Neb-Senu, dating to around 1800 BC, was filmed apparently rotating inside its sealed glass case. A time-lapse video showed it turning 180 degrees over several days, moving only during museum opening hours. The video went viral. Brian Cox suggested differential friction caused by foot traffic vibrations. Others preferred the supernatural. The museum moved the statuette to a different surface and the spinning stopped. The footage has been viewed millions of times. Neb-Senu, who had been sitting quietly in the collection for 80 years, became the most famous object in the building overnight.

The Living and the Dead

In 2004, the museum acquired a reproduction cast of a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil, mounted in a running posture and displayed in the main galleries. The original specimen, excavated in 1992 in South Dakota by amateur palaeontologist Stan Sacrison, is the second most complete T. rex ever found. The cast is named Stan. It is around 12 metres long and it is the first thing most children see when they walk in. It is also the reason most of them come back.

Stan is not the only skeleton with a story. Maharajah the elephant was bought by Belle Vue Zoo in 1872 at the sale of Wombwell's Menagerie in Edinburgh. When he wrecked his railway wagon, his keeper walked him the 200-odd miles from Edinburgh to Manchester, a journey that took ten days. Heywood Hardy painted one episode from the walk: the elephant refusing to pay at a toll gate. The painting, The Disputed Toll, hangs in Manchester Art Gallery. The skeleton stands in Manchester Museum. And then there is Worsley Man: a severed Iron Age head, found in Astley Moss in 1958, dated to the Roman period. Manchester's own bog body, and almost nobody knows it is here.

The museum also holds a pair of huia, the extinct New Zealand bird, a matched male and female, which is rare. There are dodo bones, an elephant bird egg, and a passenger pigeon. An entire shelf of things that no longer exist anywhere on earth, sitting in a building on Oxford Road.

But the most unexpected thing in Manchester Museum is not dead. The vivarium contains live amphibians, many of them among the most critically endangered species on the planet. The museum runs captive breeding programmes for endangered species from Madagascar, Central and South America, and Australasia, including neotropical leaf frogs: the Lemur Leaf Frog, the Yellow-eyed Leaf Frog, and the Splendid Leaf Frog. It operates under a full zoo licence. There are also leaf-cutter ants, whose colony and fungus garden you can watch through glass. A university museum on Oxford Road, holding a zoo licence for endangered amphibians, a shelf of extinctions, and the skeleton of an elephant who walked from Edinburgh. That is not what you expect, and that is exactly why it belongs in this collection.

2023

On 29 August 2021, the museum closed its doors for the most ambitious transformation in its history. A £13.5 million reconstruction programme added a new two-storey extension, a purpose-built exhibition hall, and three galleries that changed what the museum was about.

The Lee Kai Hung Chinese Culture Gallery brought the Chinese community's story into the building. The South Asia Gallery, created in partnership with the British Museum, became the first permanent exhibition space in the UK dedicated to the stories, experiences, and contributions of South Asian communities. The Belonging Gallery asked visitors to think about who owns cultural objects and who gets to tell the stories they carry. These were not neutral additions. They were a statement about what a museum in a city like Manchester should be doing in the 21st century.

The museum reopened on 18 February 2023. In its first week, 52,000 people walked through the doors. That is not a university audience. That is a city turning up.

The repatriation programme has been equally significant. In November 2019, the museum returned 43 sacred and ceremonial items to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. In September 2023, it returned 174 artefacts to Indigenous Australian peoples, including carvings, baskets, decorations, and a major collection of shell dolls to the Anindilyakwa people. Further returns are planned. A museum that was built on the Victorian instinct to collect everything is now actively giving things back, and doing it publicly, and explaining why. That takes more courage than acquiring ever did.

A Gothic building on Oxford Road, designed by the same architect who built the Natural History Museum and the Town Hall, holding 4.5 million objects from every continent, a T. Rex, a vivarium of endangered frogs, a spinning Egyptian statuette, and a set of galleries that ask harder questions than most museums dare. Free entry. 650,000 visitors a year. Walk past it every day and never go in, or walk in once and wonder why you didn't come sooner.

That's Hidden Manchester.