With a little time to kill before I caught a train home from visiting Ely Cathedral I decided to head to Ely Museum at the Old Goal as it seemed small enough that it wouldn’t take long to see everything. Admission was a reasonable £4.50 and I found the museum very interesting.
The Stained Glass Museum inside Ely Cathedral is the only UK museum of its type and as someone who loves the beauty and details of stained glass I was really looking forward to visiting and was not disappointed. Since it was founded in 1972 it has collected and preserved over 1,000 different stained glass panels and windows dating from the 13th century to the present, both religious and secular. Most are from the UK but there are some examples from Europe and the US as well.
The V&A is one of my favourite London museums. When I’m in the area I always pop in, visiting the fashion collection and then wandering up to the top floors. If you hit the right time – late afternoon on a weekday – you can pretty much guarantee to come across maybe only two other people and it feels like you have the whole place to yourself.
I’ve been to the Natural History Museum lots of times before but on this trip I wanted to pay particular attention to the building’s architecture, and of course to see the whale skeleton that replaced Dippy the diplodocus.
The Museum of Timekeeping is in the Grade II* Upton Hall in Nottinghamshire, the home of the British Horological Institute. It’s been somewhere I’ve meant to visit for a while and I finally managed it in September before it closed for the season (it has very limited opening hours between May – September). It’s a working museum with lots of clocks, watches and other devices ticking away as you make your way around.
I wasn’t really sure what to expect at the Museum of Liverpool but actually it proved to be my favourite of Liverpool’s museums. Opened in 2011 it is apparently the largest newly built national museum in the UK for more than 100 years, and I admit the building’s design was a major reason why I decided to go inside.
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The International Slavery Museum opened in 2007, the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Britain and is the only museum of its kind to look at both historical and contemporary slavery. It is housed on the first floor of the Merseyside Maritime Museum, and therefore has free entry.
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There’s a good choice of free museums and art galleries at Liverpool’s Albert Dock and the first one I visited was the Merseyside Maritime Museum which focuses on the port of Liverpool, life at sea, and of course the Titanic.
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As my ticket for the Terracotta Warriors exhibition wasn’t until late in the afternoon I had plenty of time to explore the other areas of the museum which, unlike the exhibition, has free entry.
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The reason for my recent trip to Liverpool was to go to the Terracotta Warriors exhibition at the World Museum. The exhibition is on until 28 October and proving so popular that they’ve had to extend the opening hours – I booked over two months in advance and even then didn’t have a lot of choice about what time I could go. But if you can get to it it is absolutely worth it and a fabulous exhibition.
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