A gallery that opens into a park, with the best textile collection outside London and Turner's watercolours.
Founded in 1889 from the estate of Sir Joseph Whitworth, the Manchester engineer who standardised the screw thread — which sounds like a small thing until you consider that before him a bolt from one workshop would not fit a nut from another.
The gallery is a red-brick Edwardian block on Oxford Road, transformed by a £15 million extension completed in 2015 by MUMA, which won the Museum of the Year award. The extension does one very simple thing extremely well: it opens the back of the building into Whitworth Park, which the original gallery had turned its back on.
The collections
Textiles. Around 20,000 items, from Coptic fragments to contemporary work — the finest holding outside the V&A, and appropriate for a city built on cloth. Displays rotate because the material cannot take permanent light.
Wallpapers. One of the three great collections in the world, including a large body of William Morris.
Watercolours and drawings. Turner, Blake, Gainsborough, Cotman. The Turners are shown in rotation for the same conservation reason.
Modern and contemporary, including a strong sculpture holding and an ambitious exhibition programme. The Whitworth takes more risks than Manchester Art Gallery does and misses more often, which is the correct trade.
The building and the park
The Landscape Gallery and the Art Garden blur the line between gallery and park deliberately. Whitworth Park itself is public, ordinary, well used, and full of students.
There is also a small permanent Cornelia Parker on the site — her Cold Dark Matter-adjacent work has shown here — and the gallery has an association with her that recurs in the programme.
Practical
Free. Closed some Mondays and Tuesdays — the pattern has changed more than once, so check.
Combine it with Manchester Museum, ten minutes north, and eat on the Curry Mile, ten minutes south. That is a complete and very cheap Manchester day.
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Manchester Art Gallery
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