The Manchester Museum's latest gallery (above) has five themes. Picture courtesy The Manchester Museum
New galleries at The Manchester Museum, the University of Manchester's neo-gothic portal of T-Rex skeletons and obscenely rare botanical finds, rarely fail to live up to their near two-century heritage.
The Manchester Gallery, cataloguing the city’s changing environment with underwater worlds of coral reefs, a swamp which fuelled the industrial revolution, deserts, ice ages and the academics, soldiers and humble civilians who have figured along the way, looks like being no exception.
Five themes – Journeys, Migration, the Museum, Collectors and Environment – feature an Asian elephant who arrived on foot from Edinburgh in 1872, a Benin City table sold to pay for the capture of the city by British Forces in 1897, a set of jars containing samples from the expedition HMS Challenger made across the world 140 years ago and an altar found in a Roman rubbish pit in 2008.
The now-extinct Manchester Moth is part of the show. Picture courtesy The Manchester Museum
Marie Stopes, a 20th century social reformer and pioneering palaeobotanist who was the first woman to be employed to the scientific staff at the University, is profiled alongside collections from Victorian entomologists and Eygptologists, updated by current curators and new work from local schoolchildren, and there's a section for the Manchester Moth, a flutterer named in 1830 which is now thought to be extinct.
Important figures from Manchester's history are documented in the new gallery. Picture courtesy The Manchester Museum
Other highlights include a skull and antlers from male Red Deer who lived in Manchester at the end of the last Ice Age, found during the digging of the Manchester Ship Canal at the end of the 19th century, and a headdress from Chinese tribe the Manchu, which was donated by a local resident in 1939.
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