Liverpool Museums

Guides

Merseyside has been hoarding stuff for a very long time. Liverpool’s port-of-the-world era left the city with archives, oddities and treasures from every continent and once the empire’s appetite for collecting curdled into civic pride, all of it ended up in museums.

Add the wartime bunkers, the model villages, the U-boats and a borough whose history is basically the history of glass and you end up with a museum offer that punches well above what a region of this size should reasonably have.

What follows is not a complete list, because half of Merseyside is technically a museum if you look at it long enough.

Instead, we’ve stuck to museums that the public can actually walk into without booking a private tour or being a hotel guest.

The big National Museums Liverpool venues are free, a handful of independents and council-run sites are ticketed, and a couple of the headline names are temporarily closed for redevelopment, but those are flagged clearly.

Obviously, opening times and admission prices were correct at the time of writing, but make sure to double-check before you set off.

Liverpool

Liverpool’s museums are dominated by the National Museums Liverpool group, which runs a selection of free, world-class venues across the city centre.

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A handful of strong independents and university-run museums fill in the gaps, covering everything from wartime command bunkers to a full-on Beatles archive on the waterfront.

Museum of Liverpool

Location: Pier Head, Liverpool Waterfront, L3 1DG
About: Opened in 2011 in a strikingly modern purpose-built building on the waterfront, this was the world’s first national museum devoted to the history of a single regional city. More than 6,000 objects are spread across four themed galleries, which are The Great Port, Global City, People’s Republic and Wondrous Place. They cover everything from prehistoric archaeology and the King’s Regiment to The Beatles and the city’s complicated relationship with the rest of the country.
Services: Café, shop, family activity zones and good accessibility throughout. Highlights include Ben Johnson’s enormous ‘Liverpool Cityscape’ painting and a life-size Liverbird.
Hours: Wednesday to Sunday 10:00-17:00. Closed on the 25th and 26th of December.
Admission: Free.

If you only have time for one museum on the waterfront, this is the one to go for, especially if you’ve never been to Liverpool before and would like a flavour of the city’s past.

World Museum

Location: William Brown Street, Liverpool, L3 8EN
About: Vast collections spanning archaeology, ethnology, the natural world and the physical sciences, plus a planetarium, an aquarium and the Clore Natural History Centre. The ‘Ancient Egypt: A Journey Through Time’ gallery is one of the most significant Egyptian collections in the UK and includes a properly atmospheric Mummy Room.
Services: Planetarium shows, live aquarium, dinosaur gallery, meteorites and a hands-on natural history room with over 20,000 objects. Café and shop.
Hours: Tuesday to Sunday 10:00-17:00, closed Mondays. Closed 24-26 December, 31 December and 1 January.
Admission: Free.

It is the museum most likely to keep a six-year-old quiet for an entire afternoon, with the bonus that the adults will probably learn something too.

Merseyside Maritime Museum

Location: Royal Albert Dock, Liverpool, L3 4AQ
About: Tells the story of Liverpool as a global port, taking in emigration, Titanic, Lusitania, the merchant navy and the Battle of the Atlantic. The same building also houses the Border Force National Museum on the lower floors.
Services: Permanent galleries cover Titanic artefacts, ship models, ship-building history and emigration archives.
Hours: Currently closed for essential maintenance ahead of a major redevelopment project. Reopening is scheduled for around 2028, though that has been slipping. Schools sessions and the Archives Centre continue from temporary spaces in the meantime.
Admission: Free when open.

Check liverpoolmuseums.org.uk for the latest reopening news before turning up at the Albert Dock expecting to get in.

International Slavery Museum

Location: Royal Albert Dock, Liverpool, L3 4AQ (third floor of the Maritime Museum building)
About: Opened in 2007 on the anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade. Confronts the history and lasting impact of the transatlantic slave trade, with strong content on Liverpool’s central role, the lives of enslaved people, the abolition movement, and ongoing modern slavery and human rights issues.
Services: Permanent galleries on Life in West Africa, Enslavement and the Middle Passage, and Legacy. Strong learning and outreach programmes that have continued during the closure.
Hours: Temporarily closed alongside the Maritime Museum for essential works and major redevelopment. Reopening targeted for around 2028, with pop-up displays and outreach continuing in the meantime.
Admission: Free when open.

Western Approaches Museum

I’m in Liverpool for work and popped up a day early (despite the football) to go to the Western Approaches museum. My Great Grandfather George Philip Grieve was sunk in December 1940 by U101 in the Atlantic….

— Ally CG (@missiontoofar.bsky.social) 2025-04-27T12:33:47.509Z

Location: 1-3 Rumford Street, Exchange Flags, Liverpool, L2 8SZ
About: An almost untouched WWII command bunker buried beneath Liverpool’s commercial district. The ‘Citadel’ was where the Battle of the Atlantic was directed and visitors can walk through the operations room, the map room, the communications rooms and the Admiral’s office, with most of it still arranged roughly as it was when the war ended.
Services: Self-guided visit with original artefacts, plotting tables and code-breaking displays. Pre-bookable guided tours are also available and worth doing if you want the proper context.
Hours: Monday to Sunday 10:00-17:00, with last admission at 16:00.
Admission: Adults £10.50, under-5s free, concessions available. Guided tours from £75 per group of up to 15, plus entry per person. The venue is cashless.

Williamson Tunnels Heritage Centre

Location: The Old Stableyard, Smithdown Lane, Edge Hill, Liverpool, L7 3EE
About: An underground tour of the bizarre tunnel network excavated in the early 1800s by eccentric tobacco merchant Joseph Williamson to give jobs to local people.
Services: Guided tours through a section of the network, museum displays on Williamson’s life and times and a small gift shop.
Hours: Typically Friday to Sunday 10:00-16:00. The schedule is limited, so confirm before travelling.
Admission: Modest admission charge. Phone 0151 709 6868 to confirm current prices and tour availability.

The Beatles Story

Location: Britannia Vaults, Royal Albert Dock, Liverpool, L3 4AD
About: The world’s largest permanent Beatles exhibition. Recreations of the Casbah Coffee Club, the Cavern, Abbey Road Studio 2 and a full-size yellow submarine, plus John Lennon’s white piano, George Harrison’s first guitar and a fair amount of memorabilia that has come and gone over the years.
Services: Multimedia audio guide in 12 languages, Discovery Zone for younger visitors, plus the Fab4 Café and Fab4 Store on site.
Hours: Sunday to Friday 09:00-17:30, last entry 16:15. Saturday 09:00-18:30, last entry 17:15. During Liverpool school holidays, it stays open until 18:30. Closed on Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
Admission: Adult £20, senior/student £16, child 5-15 £11, under-5s free. Cheaper online. The entrance lift is currently out of order, so be aware that there are 19 shallow steps down to the exhibition.

It is unapologetically aimed at tourists, but a properly committed Beatles obsessive can easily lose half a day in here.

British Music Experience

Location: Cunard Building, Pier Head, Liverpool, L3 1DS
About: The UK’s museum of popular music, charting British pop from 1945 to the present day through costumes, instruments and memorabilia from David Bowie, Adam Ant, Oasis, the Spice Girls, Adele and pretty much everyone in between. Interactive ‘play it’ studios let you have a go on instruments and learn dance routines, with varying degrees of dignity intact at the end.
Services: Interactive instrument booths, a dance studio, costume displays, audio guide, shop.
Hours: Varies considerably by month, so check before turning up. Roughly Wednesday/Tuesday to Sunday 10:00-17:00 in quieter months, and daily 10:00-17:00 in peak months. Last entry 15:45.
Admission: £21 on the door, £19 if pre-booked. Under-5s free. Entry is time-slotted every 15 minutes.

Victoria Gallery & Museum

Location: University of Liverpool, Ashton Street, L69 3DR
About: Housed in Alfred Waterhouse’s gloriously over-the-top red-brick Victoria Building is the original ‘red brick’ university. The first-floor museum displays the University’s natural history, dentistry, archaeology and scientific instrument collections, while the ground-floor galleries show fine and applied art from the University’s collection.
Services: Permanent collection plus a busy programme of temporary exhibitions. The Waterhouse Café and a shop sit on the ground floor.
Hours: Galleries Tuesday to Saturday 10:00-17:00, last entry 16:30. The café and shop are also open Mondays 09:00-16:00, although the galleries themselves are closed Mondays for maintenance.
Admission: Free.

The Wirral

The Wirral has a strong number of heritage museums on its eastern side, taking in a model industrial village, a real Second World War U-boat and a working tram network.

Several sites are now run by Big Heritage, the social enterprise also behind Western Approaches in Liverpool.

Port Sunlight Museum

Location: 23 King George’s Drive, Port Sunlight, Wirral, CH62 5DX
About: Tells the story of the model village built by William Hesketh Lever for workers at his Sunlight Soap factory. Displays cover the Lever family, the manufacturing of soap, the village’s architecture and what it is actually like to live as a Port Sunlight resident across the past 130 years.
Services: Permanent gallery, recreated period rooms, a garden village walking trail (separate and self-guided), a shop and a free car park shared with the Lady Lever Art Gallery.
Hours: Typically daily 10:00-17:00, with last entry at 16:30. Check portsunlightvillage.com before travelling for seasonal variations.
Admission: Modest admission charge, with tickets giving multi-visit access for a year, which is handy if you fancy doing the gallery and the village in one go and coming back for the museum later.

Birkenhead Priory & St Mary’s Tower

Location: Priory Street, Birkenhead, Wirral, CH41 5JH
About: The oldest standing building on Merseyside, founded in 1150 as a Benedictine monastery. Climbing St Mary’s Tower delivers panoramic views over Cammell Laird, the River Mersey and the Liverpool skyline that almost nobody seems to know about.
Services: Self-guided visit through the chapter house, undercroft and refectory, a small exhibition on monastic life and Birkenhead’s history, as well as the tower climb itself.
Hours: Seasonal opening, typically Wednesday to Sunday afternoons in summer. Confirm with Wirral Council before visiting.
Admission: Free.

U-Boat Story

Location: Woodside Ferry Terminal, Birkenhead, Wirral, CH41 6DU
About: Built around U-534, one of only four surviving WWII U-boats and the only one in the UK. The boat was sunk by the RAF in 1945, raised in 1993 and then sliced into four sections for display, so visitors can actually see inside it, which is the bit you’ll remember.
Services: Currently under major redevelopment by Big Heritage as part of a £19.6 million levelling-up project at Woodside, with a new café, green space and a reimagined ‘Battle of the Atlantic’ attraction in the works. Reopening was expected in 2025-26, but has stalled, so check before travelling.
Hours: Closed for redevelopment at the time of writing. Check bigheritage.co.uk for current status.
Admission: Charged when open.

Wirral Transport Museum

Location: 1 Taylor Street, Birkenhead, Wirral, CH41 1BG
About: Heritage trams, vintage buses, motorcycles and cars, plus a working tramway running roughly half a mile between the museum and the Woodside ferry terminal. Operated by Big Heritage since 2023.
Services: Working heritage tram rides when running, exhibits on Wirral’s transport history, a model railway, and a shop. The museum is being doubled in size as part of phased redevelopment, with a fuller reopening targeted for the summer of 2026.
Hours: Currently limited opening during works, typically weekends. Check the museum’s social channels for the current schedule.
Admission: Modest admission, with a separate fare for tram rides.

Sefton

Sefton’s principal heritage venue sits in Southport’s grand Lord Street arts quarter, and it manages to combine a local-history museum, an Egyptology display and a contemporary art gallery into one building.

That makes it efficient if nothing else.

The Atkinson

Location: Lord Street, Southport, PR8 1DB
About: A combined museum, gallery, theatre and library complex in a restored Victorian-Edwardian building. The museum side covers Sefton’s coastal history in ‘Between Land and Sea: 10,000 Years of Sefton’s Coast’ and is home to the Anne Fanny Goodison Egyptology Collection, with around 3,500 artworks and 25,000 historical artefacts across the whole venue.
Services: Local history museum, Egyptology gallery, art galleries (see the Galleries directory elsewhere on this site), a studio theatre and concert hall, library, café and shop.
Hours: Monday to Saturday 10:00-16:00. Sunday 11:00-16:00 during school holidays only.
Admission: Free admission to the museum and galleries, but events are ticketed separately.

It is the kind of venue where you intend to pop in for half an hour and end up staying for the afternoon, particularly if there is anything on in the concert hall.

Knowsley

Knowsley’s council-run museum service tells the story of the borough’s industrial and social heritage.

The same team also runs Kirkby Gallery (which is covered in the Galleries directory).

Prescot Museum

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Location: The Prescot Centre, 1 Aspinall Street, Prescot, Knowsley, L34 5GA
About: Tells the story of Knowsley, its people, industries and heritage. That includes Prescot’s role as the historic centre of English clockmaking and the watch-tool industry, the local cable works, archaeology, social history and the more recent arrival of the Shakespeare North Playhouse next door.
Services: Permanent and rotating displays, family activities and natural links to Shakespeare North.
Hours: Monday to Friday 10:00-17:00, with last entry at 16:30. Saturday 10:00-13:00, with last entry at 12:30. Closed Sundays and bank holidays.
Admission: Free.

St Helens

St Helens is, as ever, pushing the boundary of what counts as Merseyside, but it’s still part of the county and its museum offering is worth knowing about.

That focuses on the town’s dominant historic industry, which is glass-making. St Helens was once the home of Pilkington Glass and remains a major centre for glass research and manufacture.

The World of Glass

Location: Chalon Way East, St Helens, WA10 1BX
About: Tells the story of glass-making in St Helens and around the world. It sits beside the restored ‘Hotties’ Tank House’, a vast Victorian regenerative furnace that is itself a scheduled monument. The galleries cover the science of glass, the social history of the workforce and contemporary glass art.
Services: Permanent museum, live glass-blowing demonstrations in a working hot-shop, café, shop, gift gallery and function rooms.
Hours: Monday to Saturday 10:00-17:00 (November to February half-term 10:00-16:00). Closed Sundays, bank-holiday Mondays, the 25th and 26th of December and the 1st of January.
Admission: The Tank House and museum are free. Live glass-blowing display tickets cost £5 for adults and £3.50 for children, and they are easily the best bit, so plan your visit around one of the demonstration times.