LIVERPOOL THE MUSEUM OF
The world’s fi rst national city museum opens in July. Director of urban history Janet Dugdale tells Kathleen Whyman how the striking building is being used to tell the story of Liverpool’s people and its role in global history
Please describe the museum
Opening in July, the Museum of Liverpool (MoL) is devoted to the story of Liverpool on an international, national and local scale. It will be the world’s fi rst national museum that’s dedicated to the history of a regional city. Costing £72m (82m, US$117.4m), it’s the largest newly-built national museum in Britain for a century. The striking, purpose-built building is
set right on Liverpool’s waterfront and cov- ers 10,000sq m (108,000sq ft); 8,000sq m (86,000sq ft) of which is public space. Set over three fl oors, there are four very big
galleries and three smaller ones. It’s unu- sual to build from scratch, especially on such a large scale, so has been fantastic to design the spaces we need for the collec- tions and the stories we want to tell and to really think about sustainability and future- proofi ng our ideas. The museum’s fl exible in terms of how the galleries are set up and the exhibition system allows us to easily reconfi gure and change, so we can display more items over time. The location is very important. Placed
at the heart of the city’s waterfront look- ing into the city, the museum also looks
out over the River Mersey to the Irish Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. Liverpool is a place many people, ideas and goods have passed through and it has interacted in national and global histories. To amplify that, the two major galler- ies on the second fl oor – The People’s Republic and Wondrous Place – have fan- tastic, huge windows. One looks over the river and the other looks out over the city.
Where did the inspiration for the MoL come from?
MoL has evolved from the Museum of Liverpool Life, which was a very successful museum for its size from 2000 to 2006. We went from having 100,000 visitors a year to 350,000 visitors and the museum didn’t have the facilities to cope with those num- bers or to develop. As well as knowing there was a real
appetite for Liverpool history, we needed somewhere bigger to show our collection. We have some fantastic material includ- ing some very large objects, particularly transport industry objects that we didn’t
(Left) The city’s landscape is an exhibit in itself with the building doubling up as a viewing platform as well as a museum
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PROJECT PREVIEW
PHOTO: ©MILLS MEDIA
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