The national museum of democracy, in a pump house, holding the largest collection of trade union banners in the world.
Britain has national museums of ships, railways, coal, film and football. This is the national museum of the thing that made all of them survivable: the vote, the union and the right to argue in public.
It is in a converted hydraulic pumping station on the Irwell, joined to a modern extension, and it is free.
The banners
The collection is around 400 trade union and political banners, the largest in the world, and it is the reason the museum matters.
These are enormous painted silk objects, up to four metres across, carried at the head of marches — miners’ lodges, weavers, dockers, the co-operative societies, the suffrage organisations. They were expensive, they were commissioned by people who did not have money, and they were the public face of an organisation in an era when a banner was how you announced that you existed.
The oldest surviving trade union banner in the world is here, and so is the flag believed to have been carried at Peterloo in 1819.
Silk of that age is desperately fragile, which is why the museum runs its own Textile Conservation Studio — the only one of its kind attached to a British museum — and why the display rotates.
The galleries
Two main floors, chronological.
1819 to 1945 — Peterloo, the Chartists, the co-operative movement founded by the Rochdale Pioneers in 1844, the birth of the Trades Union Congress in Manchester in 1868, the suffragettes, and the founding of the Labour Party.
1945 to now — the welfare state, immigration and the trade unions, the miners’ strike, and a contemporary section that keeps changing because the subject keeps changing.
The tone is not neutral and the museum does not pretend it is. It is a museum about a struggle, told from the side that was struggling. It is also careful with the awkward parts — the racism in some unions, the way the movement treated women — rather than tidying them away.
Practical
Free, with a suggested donation of a few pounds that is genuinely worth paying.
There is a good café in the pump house and a shop that sells the kind of books you would expect.
The Peterloo Memorial is a ten-minute walk. Doing the two together, in that order, is the best hour and a half of history in Manchester.
More History
Castlefield and the Roman Fort
A rebuilt Roman gate, the world's first industrial canal basin, and a garden on a Victorian viaduct — all in one basin.
The Peterloo Memorial
Eighteen dead, hundreds injured, and two hundred years before the city built anything to mark it.