Past exhibitions

'Hitched, Wedding Clothes and Customs' will explore the history of marriage and the customs surrounding it, from Victorian times to the present day. While focusing on the changing styles in wedding dress during that time, the exhibition will also look at contemporary ceremonies such as same sex partnerships and pagan weddings.

About 20 outfits, including wedding dress from Liverpool's Jewish, Chinese and Traveller communities will be featured. The exhibition will show historic costume dating from1850, photographs, contemporary artefacts and personal histories.

Find out more about Hitched, Wedding Clothes and Customs

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Artist Lubaina Himid has hand-painted 30 Victorian jelly moulds to celebrate the ongoing contribution of the Black community to the city of Liverpool.  These are models of monuments which will probably never be built.  The ceramic forms are covered in brightly coloured patterns, texts and portraits.  Lubaina chose to use jelly moulds as they symbolise sugar, trade, commerce and pleasure.

This exhibition is part of 'Liverpool and the Black Atlantic', a city-wide series of exhibitions and events.

Find out more about Jelly Mould Pavilions

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A small exhibition, which showcased some of the highlights of the Tinne Collection of clothing worn by a Liverpool lady, Emily Tinne, and her six children between about 1910 and 1940.

The collection was originally the focus of the exhibition A Passion for Fashion, held at the Walker Art Gallery in 2006. 'A Sweet Life' was partly based on recently discovered letters between the family that gave fascinating new insights into the Tinne family's lifestyle, including life as a family doctor, the challenge of dressing six small children, wrangles with the servants and, of course, Emily Tinne's love of shopping.

Together with family photographs these helped to bring a long-vanished part of Liverpool's past back to life.

Find out more about A Sweet Life: fashion in a Liverpool sugar merchant's family

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'Unfolding' was an exhibition of art works created by artists Steve Rooney and Sue Williams in collaboration with designer, Damian Cruickshank.

The ‘interventions’ on display were a response to the work that Steve and Sue have undertaken over the past three years with former patients of the Brain Injury Rehabilitation Centre at Mossley Hill Hospital, part of the Merseycare NHS Trust

All of the works were made from paper based material, which was folded to form three dimensional shapes. Each of these sculptures use geometric design to investigate different facets of the conscious mind. The facets that they explored were: executive function, memory, creative self, social self and industrious self. The sculptures were made for different rooms in Sudley House and each piece of work was inspired by the way that room was originally used.

Included in the exhibition were a series of artworks created by participants at the Mossley Hill Brain Injury Rehabilitation Centre following their visits to Sudley House during 2008, as part of the ‘Making More Sense’ project.

Find out more about unfolding

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Some of Liverpool and Wirral’s lost Victorian and Edwardian mansions were shown in this stunning photographic exhibition. Twenty-five photographs by Harry Bedford Lemere (1864-1944) gave a rich insight into the houses of local merchants at the time, including the home of Lord Leverhulme, Thornton Manor.

This exhibition (and its previous incarnation at Lady Lever Art Gallery) was organised in collaboration with English Heritage (National Monuments Record).

Find out more about Merchant Palaces