Manchester Museum Tours and Activities

Mummies and dinosaurs roam the corridors of this Victorian museum, at the heart of Manchester's university campus – sometimes literally. The annual Museum Mummy Walk is one of the highlights of Halloween in the city, and a brilliant example of how Manchester Museum is more than just a collection of dusty artefacts.The Museum dates back to 1821, when natural history was all the rage, and Manchester's Society of Natural History bought one of the larger private collections of the city's wealthy textile merchants. At first they were exhibited Peter Street, as part of the Owen University, but when the University moved to Oxford Street, they were keen for a museum to rival the Natural History Museum of London. So they hired Alfred Waterhouse, the architect responsible for that world-famous building. Today's neo-Gothic museum is the result of his handiwork.The Manchester Museum is somewhat unusual, in that it remains part of the university, with research having remained active across its collections. As a result, they are huge in both scale and diversity. Over four million objects have been collected here, making it Britain's largest university museum. The topics covered include geology, zoology, archaeology, botany, coins and even archery. Interactivity is important here. Many of the artefacts in its vast collections are available for you to investigate, draw and handle, too. There are even galleries where the museum literally comes to life – the aquarium and vivarium. Here you'll see fish, amphibians and reptiles swimming, hopping and crawling, rather than preserved in dry museum display cabinets. The museum has also set aside 'Nature Discovery areas, to help get younger children engaged with the natural world.But Manchester Museum is perhaps best known for those mummies and dinosaurs. It has one of the best collections of Ancient Egyptian artefacts and mummies in the country, ranging across 10,000 years of Egypt's history. And its fossils are second to none, numbering 140,000, many from the hills around Manchester. But the star is Stan. This 65 million year-old Tyrannosaurus Rex is the most complete T-Rex skeleton ever found, and stands proud on the Museum's ground floor. Only found in 1992, he's the symbol of a museum on an endless quest of discovery.