🖼️ Manchester Museum

Part of the University of Manchester, Manchester Museum houses over 4.5 million objects spanning natural history, archaeology, and anthropology. The collection includes Egyptian mummies, dinosaur fossils, a vivarium with live frogs and reptiles, and extensive collections from world cultures. After a major 2023 renovation, the museum offers stunning modern galleries alongside Victorian charm. A guide unlocks stories that the labels alone cannot tell, such as the provenance of the museum's prized mummy of Asru, a temple chantress from Thebes whose CT scans revealed parasitic infections that shed light on daily life in ancient England's imperial collecting era. They navigate you through the South Asia Gallery, created in collaboration with diaspora communities across Manchester, and explain how the Gothic Revival architecture of Alfred Waterhouse's 1885 building was deliberately designed to echo his Natural History Museum in London.