World Museum

World Museum

The World Museum covers just about everything. Archaeology, ethnology, the natural world, the physical sciences and space, all under one roof on William Brown Street, directly opposite St George’s Hall. If the Museum of Liverpool is about the city, this one is about everywhere else.

It started life in 1851 as the Derby Museum, built around the natural history collection left to Liverpool by the 13th Earl of Derby, who had kept a menagerie out at Knowsley. It opened in two shared rooms on Duke Street and outgrew them almost immediately. Sir William Brown, a local MP and merchant, donated both the land and much of the money for a purpose-built home and around 400,000 people turned out for the opening in 1860.

In the May of 1941, a German firebomb burnt the building to a shell. Much of the collection had been moved out at the start of the war, but a great deal was lost and parts of the museum stayed shut for another fifteen years. A £35 million refurbishment in 2005 doubled the display space, added the six-storey atrium you walk into now and gave the place its current name.

The Ancient Egypt gallery is the headline act. It reopened in the April of 2017 at 1,000 square metres, making it the largest Egyptian gallery in the country outside the British Museum and it brought the Mummy Room back after 150 years with ten mummies on display. The Egyptian holdings run to roughly 15,000 objects. Most of that came through Joseph Mayer, a local goldsmith who handed over more than 5,000 pieces in 1867, as well as through decades of subscribing to digs in Egypt and Sudan.

Elsewhere you have the planetarium, which opened in 1970 and was the first in the country outside of London, the Clore Natural History Centre where the collections can be handled up close, live insect colonies and a dinosaur and natural world gallery. Tucked away in the reserve collections are specimens from Darwin, Wallace and Audubon, along with a dodo and a great auk egg.

The Basics

  • Where: William Brown Street, Liverpool, L3 8EN, directly opposite St George’s Hall
  • Opening hours: 10:00 to 17:00
  • Admission: Free, and no booking is needed
  • Facilities: Café and shop
  • Don’t miss: The Ancient Egypt gallery and the Mummy Room, as well as a planetarium show
  • Best for: Keeping children occupied for an entire afternoon, and any wet Liverpool day
  • Run by: National Museums Liverpool