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The Manchester Museum

The Manchester Museum is owned by the University of Manchester. Sited on Oxford Road at the heart of the university's group of neo-Gothic buildings, it provides access to about six million items from every continent and serves both as a resource for academic research and teaching and as a regional public museum.

The museum's first collections were assembled by the Manchester Society of Natural History, formed in 1821 with the purchase of the collection of John Leigh Philips. In 1850 the collections of the Manchester Geological Society were added.

By the 1860s both societies encountered financial difficulties and, on the advice of the evolutionary biologist Thomas Huxley, Owens College (now the University of Manchester) accepted responsibility for the collections in 1867. The college was then in Quay Street and the museum in Peter Street. The old museum was sold in 1875 after the college had moved to new buildings in Oxford Street.

The college commissioned Alfred Waterhouse, the architect of London's Natural History Museum, to design a museum to house the collections for the benefit of students and the public on a site in Oxford Road (then Oxford Street). The Manchester Museum was opened to the public in 1888. At the time, the scientific departments of the college were immediately adjacent.

Two subsequent extensions mirror the development of the collections. The 1912 'pavilion' was largely funded by Jesse Haworth, a local textile merchant, to house the archaeological and Egyptological collections acquired through excavations he had supported. The 1927 extension was built to house the ethnographic collections. The Gothic Revival street frontage which continues to the Whitworth Hall has been ingeniously integrated by three generations of the Waterhouse family.