A science museum for Manchester

The creation of a science and industry museum reflected shifting intellectual attitudes towards science and technology in Manchester and beyond. Objects displayed at the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, held at the Crystal Palace in London, had formed the nucleus of Britain’s national museum: the South Kensington Museum, forerunner to the Science Museum.Footnote ⁵ Beyond the capital, in the British context, the civic museums that had emerged from the Public Libraries and Museums Act of 1845 often held nascent science collections. However, by the 1870s, physicist James Joule informed the Royal Commission on Scientific Instruction and the Advancement of Science that regional museums were ‘not sufficiently comprehensive’. Joule noted that in Manchester there was ‘nothing to speak of in chemistry, there are not manufactured products, nor are there machine or scientific instruments, and they are also deficient in patented inventions’.Footnote ⁶ Scientific instruments and prototypes of inventions were acquired by other civic museums to illustrate local narratives of industrial capital. For example, at Birmingham’s City Museum and Art Gallery, early acquisitions included the Woolrich generator and William Murdoch’s locomotive.Footnote ⁷ Closer to Manchester, in 1886 Bolton’s Chadwick Museum gained possession of the only surviving spinning mule made by Samuel Crompton.Footnote ⁸ Yet Manchester continued to lack significant industrial or scientific collections. While the Owen’s College Manchester Museum housed natural-science and ethnographic collections, Manchester Corporation focused municipal collecting on art.Footnote ⁹

Calls for a dedicated science museum for Manchester emerged through intellectual networks contemporaneous with developments at South Kensington. Devotees of science, as Robert Kargon termed the men whose focus was science and engineering (in contrast to earlier gentlemen–amateurs), built relationships at the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society.Footnote ¹⁰ Alongside the ‘Lit and Phil’, other learned societies collected apparatus that was sometimes available for the public to view. Particularly successful here was the Natural History Society, which built a Museum of Natural History on Peter Street in 1835. The Manchester Geological Society’s collection enlarged this museum in 1850. Another institution fleetingly emerged in the premises of the town’s exchange: the Royal Victoria Gallery for the Encouragement and Illustration of Practical Science. This opened in 1840 under the directorship of physicist William Sturgeon with the aim of ‘combining philosophical instruction and general entertainment’, folding within two years due to insufficient financial support.Footnote ¹¹

Another significant development was the creation of Manchester’s first free public library at the former Hall of Science on Byrom Street. Established in 1840 by followers of socialist pioneer Robert Owen, the Hall of Science presented ‘science’ as a system of rational enquiry; there, speakers like John Watts communicated moral philosophy through scientific imagery.Footnote ¹² The reuse of the hall for the library (established through funds raised after the 1850 Public Libraries Act) was seen as symbolic by proponents. At the opening on 2 September 1852, Manchester’s mayor, John Potter, declared, ‘we shall never again see in this hall any chartist or socialist meetings’.Footnote ¹³ Alongside book collections, the library included a ‘museum room’ containing technical models of the latest inventions, although it is unclear how public this space was.Footnote ¹⁴

Across the nineteenth century, ‘Manchester men’ were characterized as an enterprising cohort without high taste. James Joule, for example, later blamed swift closure of Royal Victoria Gallery on the Manchester merchants’ ‘indifference to pursuits of an elevated character’.Footnote ¹⁵ This stereotype was later exacerbated in twentieth-century historiography through the influence of A.J.P. Taylor.Footnote ¹⁶ Angus Smith, chemist and secretary of the Lit and Phil, urged the Society of Arts in April 1857 that the ‘first duty of Manchester’ should be to ‘obtain a permanent museum that included all those inventions which her ingenious sons have made so profusely’.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet the merchants looked to high taste and artistic endeavour to proclaim Manchester’s cultural status. In 1857, the largest art exhibition ever staged, the Art Treasures Exhibition, was held at a temporary palace in Trafford, attracting 1.3 million visitors from May to October 1857.Footnote ¹⁸ Unlike the Great Exhibition, industry was to be forgotten at Art Treasures, despite the proponents’ industrial connections, particularly with the calico printing trade.Footnote ¹⁹ Visitors were invited (by the poet John Keats) to ‘cast aside their daily cares and devote themselves to the appreciation of art and beauty’.Footnote ²⁰

Meanwhile, negotiations between the naturalists behind the Museum of Natural History and the corporation over a dedicated public museum broke down, in part due to the society’s insistence that they retain control of the collections. The Museum of Natural History’s closure in 1872 heralded the migration of collections to Owens College on Oxford Road, ultimately instated in the Manchester Museum in 1882.Footnote ²¹ The same year, Manchester Corporation acquired the collections of the Royal Manchester Institute to form the Manchester Art Gallery, again placing art rather than industry at the heart of civic culture.

According to historian of technology Donald Cardwell, the next serious attempt to create a science museum at the turn of the century was intended to be in honour of William Sturgeon’s contribution to electrical engineering. Silvanus P. Thompson, pioneer of electrical-engineering education, and physicist Professor W.W. Haldane Gee of the Manchester College of Technology, gained the support of Sir William Bailey, the chairman of a prominent Salford-based electrical engineering company. At that time, following the removal of the Royal Infirmary in 1908, the municipal centre of Manchester was relocating to Piccadilly Gardens. Bailey’s proposal that a science museum could be based in Piccadilly met a dead end with his death in 1913 and the outbreak of the First World War.Footnote ²²

Cardwell’s research found no attempt between the wars to revive these plans. But in the 1920s, the Municipal College of Technology (also home to the Victoria University’s Faculty of Technology) did contemplate founding a museum. The ‘Tech’, as it was fondly known, held public displays including a War Works Exhibition in the Sculpture Hall of the Sackville Street Building from October 1919 to June 1923. As exhibits were dismantled in 1923, discussions within the college considered whether they could ‘form the nucleus of a museum’, potentially at Heaton Park.Footnote ²³ Again, the plan faltered: in 1924 the college turned its attention inwards to its centenary celebrations (the anniversary of Manchester Mechanics Institute) and its academics privately loaned material to the British Empire Exhibition.Footnote ²⁴ Cardwell concluded that ‘the final achievement of the so-often deferred project’ of what was to become the Manchester science museum came about in ‘an indirect, bizarre, illogical way or series of ways’.Footnote ²⁵ I unpick this sequence of events after the Second World War in relation to the nascent discipline of the history of science in the following section.

The North Western Museum of Science and Industry

By the post-war period, renewed optimism regarding technological progress was compounding feelings of nostalgia for previously great industries in Manchester. By the 1950s, a network of academics, museum professionals, industry professionals and local journalists strove to preserve that industrial history, which often represented innovations in applied science. It is important to understand how figures such as these conceptualized a science museum in this period: how was the history of science, and of science in public culture, perceived by them? How were attitudes to technology understood? In this section, cross-disciplinary and cross-sector cooperation suggests that the national ‘two-cultures’ debate (arts versus science, pure science versus industry), stemming from C.P. Snow’s Rede Lectures, did little in practice to discourage cooperation at the regional level.

The acute rupture with the recent past evident in bomb-damaged urban industrial areas led to the emergence of industrial archaeology as a discipline. Michael Rix, a tutor in architectural history at the University of Birmingham, is widely credited with coining the term after extramural students in the Black Country wished to explore outside the classroom.Footnote ²⁶ At the Victoria University of Manchester, Dr Wolfe Mays of the Philosophy Department and Professor Louis Matheson in Engineering lobbied for a museum of industry, along with Dr David Owen, director of the University’s Manchester Museum. The disappearance of long-established industries, especially textiles, also provoked Peter Lennox-Kerr, honorary secretary of the trade publication Skinner’s Silk and Rayon Record, to join the campaign. In 1955, Mays and Lennox-Kerr formed a science museum committee which also included E.J. Dustan, vice principal of the Municipal College of Technology. This venture was interchangeably described as a science museum and a museum of industry – with categories that were loosely defined and considered interrelated. Conversations mirrored Joule’s concept for a museum in the nineteenth century, which he envisaged as regional record of patented inventions akin to the Patent Museum in London.Footnote ²⁷

History of science as a discipline took a different course. Historians of science, mostly based at UCL and Cambridge University, crystallized the discipline principally as an early modern pursuit. These historians distanced the ‘Scientific Revolution’ from the devastating industrial application of science in the world wars through drawing the ‘Industrial Revolution’ of the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth closer to the intellectual advances of the early modern period.Footnote ²⁸ In 1954, for example, Volume 2 of Bernal’s Science in History treated industrial developments as spatially distinct within the discipline. Bernal shifts the geographical focus of scientific knowledge away from the South of England to the Midlands, the North, and Scotland. Birmingham, rather than Manchester, is afforded the most significance: ‘it is characteristic that the scientific revival of late eighteenth-century Britain should come … from Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Manchester, and most of all from the new town of Birmingham, which became its most celebrated centre’.Footnote ²⁹ At roughly the same time, Birmingham’s role in industrialization was also made more prominent in public history with the opening of a dedicated science museum in the city in 1951.Footnote ³⁰

By December 1957, the Manchester museum committee had disbanded, which Mays later blamed on the lack of funding for regional museums from both the government and Manchester Corporation.Footnote ³¹ Plans were revived in 1959 and briefly focused on celebrating revolutions. Gerald Barry, the force behind the 1951 Festival of Britain, approached the Victoria University in his capacity as Granada Television’s executive of educational programming to establish what he called a ‘museum of the two revolutions’.Footnote ³² This museum would explore Manchester’s role in both the Industrial Revolution and the ‘atomic revolution’ of the twentieth century. This new role for Manchester was based on a distinctive historiographic strand: from the 1940s onwards, academic research had begun to emphasize the cultural significance of Manchester’s rapid industrialization and growth for the Industrial Revolution.Footnote ³³ As social history as a sub-discipline developed, the idea of Manchester as the ‘first industrial city’ was cemented: by 1963 Asa Briggs had given Manchester the epithet ‘symbol of a new age’.Footnote ³⁴

Whilst details of the ‘museum of the two revolutions’ are scant, the ‘atomic-revolution’ theme presumably hinged on the achievements of Victoria University’s Langworthy Professors of Physics, where three consecutive incumbents were Nobel Prize winners. Ernest Rutherford, (whose Nobel Prize in Chemistry preceded Manchester developments) performed the first artificially induced nuclear reaction – ‘splitting the atom’ – at the university in 1917. His successor, crystallographer Lawrence Bragg, received the Nobel Prize for revealing the atomic structure of crystals using X-ray diffraction techniques and developed a research programme in crystallography at Manchester. The Langworthy chair from 1938 to 1953, Patrick Blackett, focused on cosmic-ray physics; his pioneering research using C.T.R. Wilson’s cloud chamber earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1948.Footnote ³⁵ The museum proposals appear unusually swift in historicizing recent scientific advances, but may be explained by Barry’s familiarity with ‘atomic’ displays at the Festival of Britain’s Exhibition of Science, held at the Science Museum, which was developed by a small group of ‘highly trained scientists, working in collaboration with artists and specialists from the entertainments industry’.Footnote ³⁶ The Exhibition of Science introduced visitors to atomic structure as the starting point for exploring modern science, followed by ‘excellent animated diagrams illustrating radioactivity and nuclear physics, and two cloud chambers, which work beautifully’ according to G.R. Noakes.Footnote ³⁷

The ‘museum of the two revolutions’ was ultimately beset by institutional incompatibility. Television investors were ‘frightened off’ by a suggestion that the museum be situated in a concrete-clad laboratory as part of the university’s science and engineering building programme. With grander ambitions for the project, Granada Television deemed the university’s suggestion ‘ridiculously inadequate’.Footnote ³⁸ The connection with the university, however, does reflect the dual role a science museum might perform by interpreting Manchester’s past glories alongside recent successes to invigorate regional research culture.

For the academics involved, the speed of regional deindustrialization galvanized the museum campaign, whilst the expansion of higher education in the era of ‘white heat’ provided an opportunity for action.Footnote ³⁹ By 1963, the Manchester College of Science and Technology (the latest incarnation of the Municipal College of Technology, granted a charter in 1956) had taken up the museum’s cause. Collaborations were rekindled with the Victoria University, where David Owen, the director of the Manchester Museum, stressed, ‘since the war, changes are occurring so quickly in every industry that most things which have been superseded have been scrapped … there is still time, however, for Manchester to take action’.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Robbins report on higher education, issued in October 1963, recommended that three advanced colleges of technology should receive university status – including Manchester’s College of Technology.Footnote ⁴¹ Professor William Johnson, chair of mechanical engineering, cited the influence of the Robbins report on museum plans conceptualizing Manchester as a ‘university city’ later in October 1963.Footnote ⁴²

Vivian Bowden played a crucial role in the transformation of the college into the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) in 1966, returning from his role in Harold Wilson’s government as minister for education and science (1964–5) to oversee the change. Effectively a self-taught historian, who conducted primary research on Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage for his 1953 volume on digital computing, Faster than Thought, Bowden saw the potential for cross-disciplinary cooperation in teaching and research.Footnote ⁴³ He was a vociferous advocate for technical education after a career as a physicist which spanned teaching, war work researching radar, and industry roles that included involvement in the early computer industry with Ferranti.Footnote ⁴⁴ For the museum proposals, he turned to the historian Donald Cardwell, whom he appointed to the newly formed Department for the History of Science and Technology in 1963.

Cardwell, who also began his academic career as a physicist, had been awarded a doctorate on the use of radar in lightning detection at King’s College London after the Second World War. London’s intellectual milieu allowed Cardwell to attend courses in the history of science at UCL as well as Morris Ginsberg’s sociology seminars at the LSE. By 1958, following the publication of his first book on The Organisation of Science in England, Cardwell joined the history and philosophy of science group at the University of Leeds. John Pickstone reflected that later at UMIST he ‘surrounded himself with other scientists who had turned to history’, including Arnold Pacey and William Farrar.Footnote ⁴⁵ Cardwell’s contributions to the historiography included the elevation of Manchester’s ‘hero of science’ – John Dalton – not least through his edited collection for Dalton’s bicentennial in 1966. Dalton is afforded revolutionary status by Cardwell, with Daltonian atomic theory characterized as ‘a transient … anomalous period in the long history of atomism’.Footnote ⁴⁶ The influence of Kuhn’s concept of scientific revolution through paradigm shifts is evident across the volume.Footnote ⁴⁷ Cardwell had earlier critiqued the ‘great-men’ trope in the history of science, yet the shaping of this volume along the lines of Dalton’s idiosyncratic perspective on atomism essentially validates great-men history.Footnote ⁴⁸

Alongside these historiographic influences, Bowden’s ambition to improve science education motivated him to push forward with museum plans. Bowden urged that, as well as ‘relics of the great past’, the museum should include working exhibits to illustrate principles of engineering and physical science.Footnote ⁴⁹ This was reflected in a report, ‘The city of Manchester, proposed museum of science and technology’, produced by staff from the Victoria University, UMIST and the City Council at the end of October 1966. This foundational document argued that museum should ‘arouse at as early an age as possible the latent interests of youngsters who happen to have natural aptitudes for technology or science’.Footnote ⁵⁰ This consideration reflects developments in teaching; from 1962 onwards the Nuffield Science Teaching Project had been working to improve science teaching in secondary (ages eleven to sixteen) education and by 1967 had developed materials aimed at five- to thirteen-year-olds. The ethos of the Nuffield project, linking the school curriculum to research culture, was reflected in the attitude of Cardwell’s research assistant, Richard Hills. Hills emphasized to Nature in 1968 the significance of the museum to both university and local ‘school science’.Footnote ⁵¹

Civic pride also continued to shape the proposal: the working party declared that the museum should ‘contribute towards an embellishment of the national and international image’ of the city.Footnote ⁵² Peter Shapely has noted that post-war civic pride in Manchester was characterized by modernist ambition, whilst urban actors used the past as evidence of status.Footnote ⁵³ Plans for the museum were closely bound to the enhancement of the image of UMIST in Manchester and as a national education institution, with rhetoric about the city’s international image fulfilling wider civic boosterist aims.Footnote ⁵⁴ Manchester was portrayed as a centre for science, invention and the application of technologies. In the field of social and economic history, Eric Hobsbawm lent further historiographical credence to these claims: ‘whoever says industrial revolution says cotton. When we think of it, we see, like the contemporary foreign visitors to England, the new and revolutionary city of Manchester’.Footnote ⁵⁵

Whilst directors Norman Berthenshaw of the Birmingham Science Museum and Dr David Follett of the Science Museum lent their support behind the scenes, publicly the museum committee stoked regional rivalry. Parallels were drawn with Birmingham and London as contrasting (even inferior) contexts for scientific achievement. In 1963, Cardwell and Johnson boldly claimed, ‘Manchester boasts a record in science, technology and education which no other city can rival. Certainly, Birmingham cannot, yet Birmingham now has a Science Museum while Manchester has not’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Moreover, Bowden told the Daily Telegraph that North West-made exhibits at the London Science Museum should be displayed in a North West city.Footnote ⁵⁷ Comparisons with the capital and Birmingham, England’s second city, fit into mid-1960s rhetoric espoused by local interests which proclaimed Manchester ‘capital of the North’ as city planners formulated Operation Re-birth.Footnote ⁵⁸ Cardwell and Johnson believed they would achieve what Prince Albert had ‘failed’ to do and create a true ‘university city to rival South Kensington’.Footnote ⁵⁹

Whilst this combination of educational aspiration and civic pride underpinned rhetoric around the emerging institution, the 1966 report set out its primary function as a museum to acquire, conserve, research and exhibit objects.Footnote ⁶⁰ The collecting policy evolved from years of discussions within UMIST, the wider academic community and council representatives, emphasizing local industries like textile technology, mechanical engineering and the chemical industries. For large objects, emphasis was placed upon displaying the Industrial Revolution ‘in appropriate milieu’, suggesting a satellite museum for machines in their ‘historically correct conditions’. Despite ambitions to rival the national Science Museum in South Kensington, the collection was distinctly regional. The Manchester Museum of Science and Technology officially opened on 20 October 1969 at the Oddfellows Hall on Grosvenor Street.Footnote ⁶¹ The Edwardian baroque building, originally the headquarters of the Manchester Unity of Oddfellows, was intended as a temporary home as it was due to be demolished during the extension of the adjacent metallurgy building.Footnote ⁶² By 1971, it had been renamed the North Western Museum of Science and Industry (NWMSI) to reflect its regional role.Footnote ⁶³ Active collecting – the industrial-salvage mission – led to an urgent need to find permanent premises. Objects, including heavy industrial machinery collected by Richard Hills, were stored inadequately around the UMIST campus until a permanent location was secured.Footnote ⁶⁴

Liverpool Road Station: an unlikely science museum

As noted earlier, one of the earliest candidates for the long-term museum site was Liverpool Road Station. This had been the first purpose-built passenger station serving a regular, intercity service, earmarked for statutory protection in the post-war period.Footnote ⁶⁵ The fact that, in December 1959, a British Railways official had to refute claims that the station would become a railway museum in the Daily Telegraph, made clear that such speculation about its future was rife.Footnote ⁶⁶ The passenger building was given official protection in 1963, but since Liverpool Road consists of a variety of infrastructure, this did not protect the entire station.Footnote ⁶⁷ The focus of formal heritage protection on the 1830s buildings narrowed its museum potential both physically and in terms of the site’s conceptualization. Again, public discourse on the preservation of Liverpool Road centred on familiar tropes in the history of science: great firsts, pioneering inventors and their inventions (focused on Robert Stephenson’s Rocket locomotive) and British exceptionalism, rather than the broader social and economic contexts from which these developments emerged.Footnote ⁶⁸

Rumours of a transport museum at Liverpool Road in the early 1960s were not unfounded; according to Richard Hills, in 1963 John Scholes, as curator at the British Transport Commission’s Department of Relics and Records, had proposed the station as an outpost of the national museum.Footnote ⁶⁹ The British Transport Museum at Clapham opened in stages from 1960. However, the Clapham museum, along with branches at Swindon and York, was beset by soaring costs.Footnote ⁷⁰ In this context, the possibility of a nationally funded railway museum in Manchester seemed slim. However, local authorities in Glasgow, Leicester, Liverpool, and Birmingham all independently created museums or substantial galleries within civic museums with a focus on transport between 1965 and 1972.Footnote ⁷¹ At this stage, Manchester Corporation did not consider Liverpool Road for a transport museum, rather, city councillor Maurice Pariser supported plans for an industrial-archaeology museum and became a key supporter of the UMIST science museum scheme.

Returning to the North Western Museum of Science and Industry, there were opportunities across the 1960s to establish a transport collection that would have befitted Liverpool Road Station. Although steam locomotive technology was not included in the collecting policy developed by Hills, Cardwell was concerned to ensure its preservation. Writing after the 1963 Beeching report on The Reshaping of British Railways – which outlined vast cuts to services – and in the context of the ongoing steam locomotive scrappage scheme, Cardwell believed that the technology was at risk of disappearing within twenty years.Footnote ⁷² In 1969, writing to Jennie Lee MP, minister for the arts, Cardwell suggested that if the Clapham museum closed (which it did in 1973), the NWMSI should receive the Manchester-made exhibits.Footnote ⁷³ Bowden’s response, however, focused on the lack of storage space and limitations of accommodation at Oddfellows Hall.Footnote ⁷⁴ Storage and collecting priorities meant that, unlike similar institutions, the NWMSI featured no transport displays.

Liverpool Road Station, in the meantime, was still in operation and continuing to provide a skeleton goods service. The failure of British Railways to effectively modernize Manchester’s freight system led to drastic reductions in traffic from 1965 to 1968, with the result that, once again, speculation intensified around the question whether the 1830s buildings could become a museum.Footnote ⁷⁵ Veterans of the late 1950s science museum committee, David Owen and Jack Diamond, inspected Liverpool Road along with Richard Hills in 1968. The station was swiftly dismissed as a suitable premises. Hills recalled that ‘lead flashings and guttering had been stripped off the roofs, so rain was pouring in. We trod with great caution on some of the rotting floors. Parts of some of the internal walls were collapsing’.Footnote ⁷⁶

But notably, this inspection focused only on the 1830s buildings. The freight complex in its entirety included buildings from the 1850s to the 1880s, with iron columns and stronger floors suitable for heavy exhibits: looking beyond the ‘historic’ buildings provided a potential space for history. As the next section will show, a shift in funding and governance for the NWMSI, and momentum gathered by a preservation campaign for Liverpool Road Station, converged to produce the conditions in which a hybrid museum could be created.

The Greater Manchester Museum of Science and Industry

How, then, did the dilapidated station site, deemed unsuitable by key actors, become the Greater Manchester Museum of Science and Industry (GMMSI) by 1983? From the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s many other sites had also been considered, prompting a Museum Association and Carnegie Trust report to untangle the viability of various prospects.Footnote ⁷⁷ Cardwell was particularly keen on reusing a different railway structure, the Central Station, which closed in 1969 following Beeching’s recommendations. Arnold Pacey stressed Central Station’s architectural significance, stating that it was the second-largest arch span-roofed railway station and that there was ‘reason to believe’ it was the world’s first steel-framed building.Footnote ⁷⁸ This argument, an apparent ‘first’ for the history of technology in Manchester, as well as the City Council’s alternative plan to repurpose the station as an exhibition hall, drew national attention; The Times published Pacey’s ‘special reasons’ why the Central Station would better suit a science museum.Footnote ⁷⁹ Cardwell felt that the building itself would constitute an exhibit of technological importance. In contrast, the Museum Association and Carnegie Trust were calling for a modern, purpose-built museum to be built along the ‘education corridor’ along Oxford Road.Footnote ⁸⁰ These contrasting options for the permanent museum epitomize the tussle between past preservation and modernization that had been at the heart of the Manchester enterprise.

Ultimately, however, regional politics, coupled with a determined preservation campaign, reignited interest in Liverpool Road Station. Plans for the ‘education corridor’ museum faltered in 1975 when the newly formed local-government body, the Greater Manchester County Council (GMC), replaced the City Council as a major funder of NWMSI.Footnote ⁸¹ But when lobbying for the Central Station failed, Cardwell swung behind the ‘education corridor’ museum in order to improve relations between ‘town and gown’.Footnote ⁸² For the GMC, however, heritage preservation was an immediate priority in response to deindustrialization, with six of the ten constituent metropolitan boroughs already planning industrial-heritage sites.Footnote ⁸³ But even as designs to remake Liverpool Road Station as the NWMSI emerged, the GMC rejected British Railways’ offer to sell them the site for one pound in September 1976. Numerous societies and individuals lobbied the GMC and the City Council to intervene; however, the latter favoured reuse of the area for housing. In an acrimonious moment, Cardwell went so far as to directly undermine the significance of Liverpool Road Station in the history of technology, claiming that it ‘might just as well have been the first fish and chip shop in the North West’.Footnote ⁸⁴ This assessment contradicted the well-established narrative of the station as witness to the start of the railway age, which had elicited strong regional and national support ranging from railway enthusiasts, engineers, civic societies and academics.Footnote ⁸⁵

The formation of the Liverpool Road Station Society (LRSS) in 1977 played a pivotal role in the reuse of Liverpool Road and influenced the wider regeneration of Castlefield.Footnote ⁸⁶ It had two core aims: to secure the station’s future and to ensure that Manchester celebrated the 150th anniversary of the site in 1980. The dedication to commemorating a specific milestone at the station reflects the ongoing significance of the ‘cult of centenary’ and how the popular tropes of ‘first’ or ‘oldest’ station allowed preservationists to meet their long-term goals. The society included members with varied interests in the site, from former staff, to local-history enthusiasts, to architects and academics. On 26 July 1978, the GMC agreed to acquire the 1830 structures and 2.5 acres of Liverpool Road Station from British Railways. Hills and his team worked with the society – who shared an ambition to re-create a railway experience. Despite tensions across the wider museum project (particularly with GMC officers), the LRSS and NWMSI collaborated in the transitional period between the Oddfellows Hall site closure and the opening of the GMMSI on 15 September 1983.Footnote ⁸⁷ Despite fulfilling the role of NWMSI director by this stage, Hills was effectively replaced by Patrick Greene, an archaeologist and heritage professional, as the new museum director in January 1983. Greene understood the political aims of the GMC and was able to show how the proposed institution could also fulfil the role of a city history museum, using local history to contextualize science and technology narratives.Footnote ⁸⁸

Overall, interpretation strategies were underpinned by narratives of technological progress, with the railway story remaining a strong sub-theme as the historiographic influence of ‘revolutions’ emphasized the significance of the 1830s. In April 1983, Patrick Greene suggested that ‘the museum of the industrial revolution’ would be a fitting subtitle for the GMMSI. Again, the role of Liverpool Road Station in the history of technology – as site of the ‘world’s first’ passenger railway – fixed both public memory and academic analysis on the 1830s. A detrimental effect of this was the fact that later technologies represented at the station, such as an early hydraulic power network which had been installed in the 1860s, were overlooked.

The ‘Power Hall’, the first gallery encountered and the original entrance to the museum, was curated by Hills and his colleagues to display major developments in power generation, largely based on the existing collections. This gallery was housed in the 1856 Shipping Shed (a building only offered for the museum site after the decision to relocate to Liverpool Road), which crucially provided strong foundations and a heavy-load-bearing floor for large objects. The ‘Power Hall’ gallery narrative was intended to act as a benchmark for further exploration by the visitor, whom Greene envisaged would explore the Station Building and 1830 Warehouse at the west end. Essentially, the visitor would see an overview of technologies from the late eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth. In Greene’s projection, the visitor would complete their journey at the New Warehouse where textiles display, temporary exhibits and contemporary and ‘future’ science could be encountered.Footnote ⁸⁹ Yet the variety of techniques employed disguised the broader story of technological developments across the station itself, a consequence of instating an existing museum – rather than interpreting Liverpool Road as an industrial-heritage artefact in its own right, as Cardwell had intended for the Central Station in the 1970s.

Situating science

Whilst the past was set in the ‘Industrial Revolution’, interpretation was far from fixed, with demonstrable machinery and a working railway prioritized at Liverpool Road. The integration of ‘modern’ science galleries into this heritage space aligns with Alberti’s characterization of science and technology institutions as hybrid museum spaces.Footnote ⁹⁰ The ‘modern-science’ displays may have been disconnected from the heritage environment, but interactive pedagogy ran through both. In this final section, we see how interpretation based on the principles of demonstration from the 1960s initiative, and subsequent science centre models, were incorporated into plans for the ‘Xperiment!’ gallery in GMMSI, which opened in 1988.

The drive to exhibit contemporary and ‘future science’ meant that these galleries rarely reflected the history of the railway buildings around them. In 1983, the GMMSI acquired the New Warehouse (also known as ‘Lower Byrom Street Warehouse’), providing space for both heavy exhibits and a permanent interactive gallery.Footnote ⁹¹ Plans were drawn up by April 1985 to establish exhibition spaces and a science centre.Footnote ⁹² Xperiment! was funded through a capital sum linked to the abolition of the Greater Manchester Council, and industry benefactors, including electricity supplier Norweb and the British Nuclear Fuels Ltd.Footnote ⁹³ Typically, the postmodern reuse of historic buildings often leaves merely a facade alluding to their former uses.Footnote ⁹⁴ However, as the warehouse was reused for museum purposes, the historical milieu could contextualize exhibits. Dating from 1879–80, supported with cast-iron columns and wrought-iron girders, this warehouse was only later listed in June 1994.Footnote ⁹⁵ The ground floor was originally used for the loading and unloading of cotton.Footnote ⁹⁶ Therefore the installation of textile machinery exhibits in this space created opportunities for connections to be made between the Warehouse Exhibition and the building’s former uses.Footnote ⁹⁷ Yet because interpretation inherited from the North Western Museum was process-focused, with machinery used to demonstrate each stage of cotton manufacturing (alongside printing and paper making), the building’s history and, by extension, the railway’s wider role in colonial exploitation through the transport of cotton could only be inferred.

The opening of the UK’s first science centre, Richard Gregory’s Exploratory in Bristol in 1983, influenced the development of Xperiment!. Science centres typically housed interactive exhibits presenting universal scientific principles, quite deliberately without any social or cultural context.Footnote ⁹⁸ A distinction from traditional science museums is the absence of collections: rather than using a historical object to demonstrate a scientific principle, displays were purpose-built. Yet even the American prototype science centre, Frank Oppenheimer’s Exploratorium, which opened in San Francisco in 1969, included some models, sections and samples of traditional museum objects.Footnote ⁹⁹ Interactive galleries within traditional museums represent a variation on the centre model. ‘Launchpad’ at the Science Museum is widely regarded as the first science-centre-style gallery, which opened in 1986; however, Green’s Windmill in Nottingham opened a science centre to tell the story of George Green’s experiment with light, electricity and magnetism in 1985.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The inclusion of science-centre-style interactives in traditional science museums and industrial-heritage spaces exemplifies the hybridity of science museums more broadly.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Xperiment! was planned at the height of the science centre movement in the UK and the wider promotion of ‘the public understanding of science’ (PUS). Xperiment! was championed by Dame Margaret Weston, the director of the Science Museum, as a trustee of the GMMSI, whilst creating Launchpad in June 1984.Footnote ¹⁰² Weston envisaged six regional interactive galleries, with financial backing from the Sainsbury Family Charitable Trust.Footnote ¹⁰³ The Royal Society welcomed a countrywide network of science centres, which its PUS steering group perceived as a complimentary engagement approach to the traditional museum.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Greene embraced the concept and visited American and Canadian science museums, later recalling that the Ontario Science Centre in particular was ‘a revelation’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Significantly, exhibits at the Ontario Science Centre are based on broad scientific themes familiar in the traditional museum (rather than the Exploratorium’s perception-based narrative). Patrick Greene reflected on the popularity of existing demonstrable exhibits in the temporary ‘Microscopes in Manchester’ display, suggesting that ‘a science centre would … involve the visitor in a much greater degree’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Whilst representing a new model of learning through discovery, these plans followed on from the NWMSI’s established interactive-display methods. As Boon recently highlighted, intermediality characterized the twentieth-century museum before museums were critically understood as a distinct form of media.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Through bringing the science centre into industrial-museum spaces, technology narratives could shape planning and interpretation. Stella Butler, who contributed to the Xperiment! gallery, states that the subject areas associated with Manchester science formed the basis of the gallery, although she concedes that direct linkage between historical displays and the exhibits did not come to fruition.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In 1988, Xperiment! opened in the New Warehouse with hands-on exhibits around the themes of energy and light, such as an infinity tunnel and an air track. An early leaflet explains, ‘Xperiment! is an invitation to try the interactive exhibits … We want visitors to explore some of the science and technology they might see elsewhere in the museum’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ This approach mirrors Weston’s aspirations for ‘Launchpad’, which she felt ‘would be as much a technology centre as a science centre’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In a further iteration of the gallery, Greene decided to ‘place exhibits more firmly in the context of the experience that visitors bring to the museum and will make explicit links with other exhibitions’.Footnote ¹¹¹ Later visitor responses to Xperiment!, recorded in 2002, indicate that ‘placing science and technology in their social context was one of the main reasons parents had for visiting … with their children, as science and scientists have historically played a central role in the city’s industrial, social and political life’. This visitor research also highlights generational differences between grandparents aware of the historical context and parents focused on learning about scientific principles.Footnote ¹¹² By the early 2000s, the layering of interpretation and mixed uses of Liverpool Road Station buildings successfully invoked place-based nostalgia alongside engagement with science, as the mid-century science museum advocates intended.