Museum developments

A new Museum of Liverpool

View of the Museum of Liverpool from the Pier Head, April 2009
© Lee Carus Photography

The new Museum of Liverpool will be one of the world’s leading city history museums, setting the global benchmark for museums of its kind and raising social history as a museum discipline to an international scale. The museum will demonstrate Liverpool’s unique contribution to the world and will showcase popular culture while tackling social, historical and contemporary issues.

It will be housed in a new landmark building on the Mann Island site at the Pier Head, at the core of the World Heritage Site on Liverpool's famous waterfront.

Building a new museum

This brand new museum will build on the huge success of the former Museum of Liverpool Life. The old museum, with its limited floor space, could no longer accommodate the more than 300,000 visits a year it was receiving. With a greater amount of space, the new museum will be able to better represent the history of the city and can place Liverpool within a wider British urban context.

It can also provide a showcase for National Museums Liverpool’s outstanding collections, currently held in storage, on a scale that cannot be realised within the existing venues, providing an unprecedented level of access to them.

The complexity of a city, and the need to involve local people in its analysis, means that any museum exhibitions or displays should be capable of incorporating change, to examine and interpret the city as it evolves. Within the new museum there will be ‘anchor’ elements of the displays outlining the milestones of Liverpool’s development, combined with more frequently changing temporary exhibition spaces. This combination of approaches and media will realise the museum’s core value as an engine of learning through a mixture of education and entertainment.