Manchester Museum

The Manchester Museum is owned by the University of Manchester. Sited on Oxford Road (A34) at the heart of the university's group of neo-Gothic buildings, it provides access to about six million items from every continent and serves both as a resource for academic research and teaching and as a regional public museum. The museum's first collections were assembled by the Manchester Society of Natural History, formed in 1821 with the purchase of the collection of John Leigh Philips. In 1850 the collections of the Manchester Geological Society were added. By the 1860s both societies encountered financial difficulties and, on the advice of the evolutionary biologist Thomas Huxley, Owens College (now the University of Manchester) accepted...