The 12 best museums in Manchester

Every city’s got a museum with a few works by big-shot artists and dusty relics once owned by rich white men and/or pilfered from former colonies, but only Manchester has a museum dedicated to the history of democracy, radicalism, equality and social justice. The People’s History Museum tells the story of democracy from the 1819 Peterloo Massacre to the present day. The museum hosts top-notch talks and workshops year round, plus an augmented reality installation that opened in 2020.

The biggie – in fact, the biggest. The sprawling, swaggering Manchester Museum is the UK’s largest university museum. In a striking neo-Gothic setting designed by Alfred Waterhouse – the brain behind the Natural History Museum in London – the museum houses acclaimed collections in archaeology, anthropology and natural history, a vivarium for critically endangered amphibian species, and loads more. Among its permanent stash you’ve got Stan the T-rex fossil, creepy-looking mummies and a giant Japanese spider crab. 

This is where the Suffragette movement began, transforming the lives of millions around the world. It was inside 62 Nelson Street that Emmeline Pankhurst led the first meeting of the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903. Earmarked for demolition in 1978, the building was saved by campaigners and opened as the volunteer-run Pankhurst Centre in 1987 by Helen Pankhurst, Emmeline’s great-granddaughter. It’s the only museum in the UK dedicated to the story of the women who fought and died to secure the vote. The centre is small but packs a big punch, with shedloads of suffragette history, knowledgeable curators and regular talks by renowned women artists, writers, scientists and athletes.

Manchester has got the second-largest Jewish community in Britain outside London, and this museum houses more than 31,000 items that tell the story of Jewish migration and settlement in the city. The Manchester Jewish Museum unveiled a huge £6 million refurb in 2021 which included a mighty two-storey extension and an extensive restoration of its Grade II-listed synagogue. 

Manchester’s football pedigree is top class, making it the perfect home for a museum dedicated to the world’s best-loved sport. The National Football Museum is a four-floor love letter to the game, home to the official FIFA, UEFA and FA collections, including trophies, medals, kits, memorabilia, photographs and films dating back to 1863.

Designed to be equal parts unsettling and illuminating, the Daniel Libeskind-designed Imperial War Museum North is an award-winning immersive experience, architectural marvel and world-leading research centre. The museum’s unusual, almost disquieting layout means lazy, passive observation is pretty much impossible. Its location in Trafford Park, a crucial munitions centre and the main target of the Manchester Blitz, and its striking silhouette on the city’s skyline make it one of Europe’s most poignant and powerful war museums. 

For more than 50 years, the Museum of Science and Industry has celebrated the history of science and innovation, with a focus on the industrial revolution in Manchester. On the site of the oldest surviving passenger railway station and the world’s first railway warehouse, the museum hosts cutting-edge exhibitions across five historic listed buildings. Its biennial Manchester Science Festival is a highlight of the Manchester cultural calendar.  

A mere skip from the riot of Oxford Road lies Elizabeth Gaskell’s lovely old gaffe. The former home of the renowned Victorian novelist – once frequented by nineteenth-century literary royalty ranging from Ruskin to Brontë to Dickens – was in a right state in 2006, when it sat ominously on English Heritage’s at-risk buildings register. Happily, following a £2.5 million restoration, the house reopened in 2014. Now visitors can enjoy changing exhibitions and a calendar stuffed with excellent talks and workshops.

Over the water, Salford Museum and Art Gallery houses an impressive collection of Victorian fine and decorative art. Its focus is social history, featuring as it does the Local History Library and Lark Hill Place, a faithful recreation of the sights and sounds of a typical Victorian Salford street. Book ahead for the museum’s popular monthly Craft Social, led by Caroline Coates.

If you don’t get excited by vintage transport design, maps, memorabilia and historic buses and trams, what’s the matter with you? A must for transport buffs, the Museum of Transport houses more than 70 vehicles – many of which you can actually get inside – and a huge archive of brochures, route maps, tickets, photography and film. Don’t miss the old-school cafeteria and keep an eye out for the museum’s free heritage bus rides back to Shudehill.

Housed in the gorgeous nineteenth-century Ashton Canal Warehouse, the Portland Basin Museum’s centrepiece is a recreation of a 1920s street complete with terrace house, school room, chippy and pub. Learn about the area’s industrial history of mining, farming and textile manufacture, visit the changing exhibitions, and take a narrowboat trip down the canal. Day out: sorted.

Is Stockport in Manchester? Does anyone care? What matters is Hat Works, Stockport’s wonderfully zany museum of the area’s once-flourishing hatting industry. Most people know it from its huge brick chimney, which announces to those travelling in by rail from the south that Piccadilly is only ten minutes away. But it’s well worth getting off a stop early to check out the museum’s massive collection of Victorian machinery, interactive exhibits, and hundreds of hats from around the world.