Reopened in 2023 with a new South Asia gallery, a rebuilt Egypt display and 174 objects sent home.
The University of Manchester’s museum, in a Waterhouse building on Oxford Road, closed for a £15 million rebuild and reopened in February 2023. It is free, it is genuinely good, and it is doing something more interesting than most museums its size.
The restitution
In 2019 and again in 2023, Manchester Museum returned ceremonial and sacred objects to Aboriginal communities in Australia — 43 items in the first repatriation, and a further group of 174 in a ceremony with Anindilyakwa representatives from Groote Eylandt.
The museum did not do this quietly or defensively, and it did not treat it as a loss. It ran the return as a public event and has kept working with the originating communities since.
If you have been to museums where an information panel explains why nothing can ever be given back, the contrast is instructive.
The South Asia Gallery
Opened with the 2023 relaunch, in partnership with the British Museum, and — unusually — curated by a collective of around thirty people from South Asian diaspora communities in Manchester rather than by staff curators alone.
The results are uneven in the way that anything genuinely co-produced is uneven, and much better than the alternative. Objects sit next to personal testimony, a Partition suitcase next to a cricket bat next to a sound system. It is the room people talk about afterwards.
Egypt, and the Golden Mummies
Manchester has one of the more important Egyptology collections in Britain, largely through Flinders Petrie and the Manchester cotton merchants who funded his digs.
The Golden Mummies of Egypt display covers Graeco-Roman Egypt — the gilded, painted mummies of a period when Egyptian, Greek and Roman funerary practice merged. The interpretation is careful about the fact that these are human remains and asks whether they should be shown at all, which is the right question to raise where the visitor can see it.
The rest
Natural history — including Stan the Tyrannosaurus cast in the entrance hall, and a very Victorian mass of taxidermy presented with some awareness of how it was acquired.
The Living Worlds gallery, the fossils, and a top-floor Belonging Gallery about migration to Manchester.
Two hours is right. It is a fifteen-minute walk from the Whitworth, and doing both in an afternoon is the standard Oxford Road day.
More Museums
Science and Industry Museum
Built on the oldest surviving passenger railway station in the world, and free.
Manchester Art Gallery
One of the great Pre-Raphaelite collections, free, and the site of the strangest art row of the last decade.
The Whitworth
A gallery that opens into a park, with the best textile collection outside London and Turner's watercolours.