Museums - Manchester Museum

The origins of the Manchester Museum lie in the foundation of the Manchester Natural History Society, which was created in 1821 to preserve the natural history 'cabinet' of Manchester manufacturer and collector John Leigh Philips. Housed from 1835 on Manchester's Peter Street, the collections grew apace, absorbing the holdings of the Manchester Geological Society in 1850. In 1868, the museum was transferred to Owens College, which later became the University of Manchester. There the museum received its own dedicated building, designed by Alfred Waterhouse, which opened to the public in 1890. Known henceforth as the Manchester Museum, the institution received many more objects during the early twentieth century. Expansion came in 1912–13 and 1927, adding new buildings designed by Waterhouse's son and grandson wherein new ethnographic and Egyptian collections were displayed. Over the twentieth century, the collection grew to contain some six million items in a multitude of curatorial fields, including archery, archaeology, botany, Egyptology, entomology, ethnography, mineralogy, palaeontology, numismatics, and zoology. The museum expanded again in 1977 into the former Dental School, and was refurbished in the early twenty-first century, after which it reopened in 2003. The new Manchester Gallery is scheduled to open in April 2009.
Aside from its vast collections in the natural sciences, archaeology, and Egyptology, the Manchester Museum holds a significant anthropological collection that contains historical material from Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Nearly half the collections are from Africa and date from between 1850 and the present day. Oceanic art comprises around twenty-five percent of the collections, dating largely from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and including a large number of weapons. The smaller American collection includes North American, Arctic, and Peruvian items. The core of the ethnographic collection was formed in the first half of the twentieth century, with major contributions from R. D. Darbishire, Charles Heape, R. W. Lloyd, Frank Willett, and Peter Worsley. Researchers may access the collections by appointment.