Museums - World Museum Liverpool

The World Museum Liverpool originated in 1853 as the Derby Museum, housed in two rooms in a building in the center of the city, which it shared with a public library. The early museum was named after its main donor, the thirteenth Earl of Derby, whose bequeathed natural history collection formed the foundation of the museum's holdings. Years later, Liverpool merchant, banker, and politician William Brown provided the land and capital to open a dedicated building for the museum close to St George’s Hall. The early twentieth century brought expansion both to the museum building and its collections, and particularly to its natural history collection. Though the museum was ravaged by bombing during the May Blitz of 1941, the most important elements of its collections were evacuated and survived intact. Further expansion occurred in the years following the war, doubling the museum's display space and furnishing a new atrium. The renovated museum, renamed under its current title, reopened in 2005.
The World Museum Liverpool contains collections in a number of areas, including biology, zoology, anthropology, geology, astronomy, archaeology, and more. Its collection of world art and artifacts comprises antiquities from Africa, Oceania, Asia, and the Americas, as well as ancient art and numismatics from the Mediterranean and greater Europe. The ethnology collection contains very significant holdings from Asia, West and Central Africa, the Arctic and Pacific Northwest, Mesoamerica and the Amazon, New Guinea, Fiji, New Zealand, and the Solomon Islands.