Manchester Museum’s rolling programme of post-millennial gallery revamps has given it the chance to dust down and reinterpret a small selection of its sizeable natural history holdings. The latest addition is Nature’s Library, which reopened earlier this year.
The sympathetic refurbishment of Nature’s Library has restored many of the original Grade* II-listed gallery’s features.
The museum, which is on Manchester’s Oxford Road, was designed by Alfred Waterhouse, the prolific Victorian architect who was also responsible for landmarks such as Manchester Town Hall and London’s Natural History Museum.
However, in Nature’s Library the emphasis is not on the architecture of the space, but on the curiosities that are housed in a series of well-lit and carefully arranged cabinets.
The gallery is on the second floor of the museum, adjacent to the Vivarium (a live mammal gallery, which opened last month). Nature’s Library has a study and play/picnic area above, and overlooks Living Worlds – a gallery that was overhauled a couple of years ago and is home to such delights as a suspended flock of origami cranes and a sperm whale skeleton.
The new gallery continues some of the themes touched on in Living Worlds, though in a far more intimate and traditional way – the neon signs in Living Worlds have not been repeated here.
Libraries of the natural world
The gallery title is explained on the opening introduction panel: “Natural history collections are like libraries of the natural world, with preserved animals, plants and rocks instead of books.”
From this statement, the library poses four key questions: “What is in the collection? Where did the specimens come from? How can they help people to understand the world around them? Why are they important?”
The collection is huge, amassed over a 200-year period and spanning several thousand million years of history. As a result, this is very much a bullet-points-only tour, built around a dozen themed bay areas featuring large, easy to read interpretation panels between facing glass display cases.
Each wall-sized introductory panel includes a memorable quotation that ranges from the profound (“Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature.
It will never fail you,” Frank Lloyd Wright), to the political (“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated,” Mahatma Gandhi), by way of the exclamatory (“Yes, I love it! The sea is everything,” Jules Verne) and poetic (“My heart is like a singing bird,” Christina Rossetti).
Unexpected stories
There’s also an array of statistics relating to each sub-set of the wider collection – 1,000 preserved amphibians, 4,700 reptiles, 2,000 animal skulls, 1 million skeletons, 4 million shells – which give some indication of what’s in storage.
There is often a mix of the familiar and unfamiliar in the display cases. The Geography Of Life features stuffed animals on small shelves against maps of continents and includes a common grey squirrel, plus a badger and a hedgehog alongside the more exotic blue and yellow macaw, red-faced spider monkey and nine-banded armadillo, from South America.
Unexpected stories unfold in many of the cabinets. Understanding Evolution shows a duck-billed platypus, a “missing link” which, we’re informed, was widely considered to be a fake when preserved examples first began appearing in Britain from Australia during the 18th century. It’s understandable: a furry duck? A mammal that lays eggs?
Though the theme of evolution continues to crop up elsewhere, the library then goes on to explore five mass extinction events, the most recent of which was around 65m years ago.
This includes objects such as a Devonshire woolly mammoth tusk, Parisian sea snails and a slab of preserved sea floor from the deep, dark waters of what’s now Shropshire.
This epic story of the world around us continues with plant illustrations, a fist-sized West African goliath beetle, Eadweard Muybridge’s animal locomotion studies, an aardvark, a flying lemur, a dog bat, dog skulls, bird’s heads, 27 guillemot eggs, pickled woodlice, an emperor penguin, lava and herbarium sheets.
Unanswered questions
New stories unfold again and again – fragments of the Canyon Diablo meteorite, which fell 50,000 years ago, tell us that the earth is 4.5 billion years old; archived lichen helps us to study pollution levels; while specimens bought back from HMS Challenger’s historic expedition of the 1870s show how oceans have changed, giving new life and importance to ageing samples.
Walking from one bay to the next, there’s a lot of information to digest, though the introductions can prompt unanswered questions. For example, we’re told that plants are used for medical cures, but which plants? And which cures? Could we have seen some modern examples?
While the gallery sets out to tell nature’s story through bite-sized, digestible chapters, Nature’s Library also weaves another tale.
This second layer explores the history and culture of collecting and the development of museums – from how wealthy, passionate and obsessive individuals amassed collections, to the formation of societies and collections within educational establishments, and the eventual creation of public museums.
It also touches on how collections were categorised and reorganised. By displaying tools for learning, such as dissected and preserved creatures, enlarged flower models and beautifully crafted late-19th-century glass sea anemones, the gallery underlines the historic educational element.
It is also acknowledged that collecting can be a dirty business, crossing a legal line and contributing to scarcity and, therefore, value.
Accessible science
So it’s from this myriad of smaller collections, random donations and selected purchases, built up over time, that this mass of curious cabinets come.
Sadly, the library analogy doesn’t quite stretch to borrowing stuffed primates (and it’s best to ignore the highly contentious idea that libraries themselves are now just museums for books).
Yet with Nature’s Library, the UK’s largest university museum has succeeded in giving what is clearly a bewildering, monumental and fragmented collection an easy-to-navigate structure, with a well-balanced mix of accessible science and weird wonder.
Dave Freak is a writer, editor and arts consultant based in the West Midlands Manchester Museum employs the idea of a library as a metaphor for presenting its sizeable natural history collection
The sympathetic refurbishment of Nature’s Library has restored many of the original Grade* II-listed gallery’s features.
The museum, which is on Manchester’s Oxford Road, was designed by Alfred Waterhouse, the prolific Victorian architect who was also responsible for landmarks such as Manchester Town Hall and London’s Natural History Museum.
However, in Nature’s Library the emphasis is not on the architecture of the space, but on the curiosities that are housed in a series of well-lit and carefully arranged cabinets.
The gallery is on the second floor of the museum, adjacent to the Vivarium (a live mammal gallery, which opened last month). Nature’s Library has a study and play/picnic area above, and overlooks Living Worlds – a gallery that was overhauled a couple of years ago and is home to such delights as a suspended flock of origami cranes and a sperm whale skeleton.
The new gallery continues some of the themes touched on in Living Worlds, though in a far more intimate and traditional way – the neon signs in Living Worlds have not been repeated here.
Libraries of the natural world
The gallery title is explained on the opening introduction panel: “Natural history collections are like libraries of the natural world, with preserved animals, plants and rocks instead of books.”
From this statement, the library poses four key questions: “What is in the collection? Where did the specimens come from? How can they help people to understand the world around them? Why are they important?”
The collection is huge, amassed over a 200-year period and spanning several thousand million years of history. As a result, this is very much a bullet-points-only tour, built around a dozen themed bay areas featuring large, easy to read interpretation panels between facing glass display cases.
Each wall-sized introductory panel includes a memorable quotation that ranges from the profound (“Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature.
It will never fail you,” Frank Lloyd Wright), to the political (“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated,” Mahatma Gandhi), by way of the exclamatory (“Yes, I love it! The sea is everything,” Jules Verne) and poetic (“My heart is like a singing bird,” Christina Rossetti).
Unexpected stories
There’s also an array of statistics relating to each sub-set of the wider collection – 1,000 preserved amphibians, 4,700 reptiles, 2,000 animal skulls, 1 million skeletons, 4 million shells – which give some indication of what’s in storage.
There is often a mix of the familiar and unfamiliar in the display cases. The Geography Of Life features stuffed animals on small shelves against maps of continents and includes a common grey squirrel, plus a badger and a hedgehog alongside the more exotic blue and yellow macaw, red-faced spider monkey and nine-banded armadillo, from South America.
Unexpected stories unfold in many of the cabinets. Understanding Evolution shows a duck-billed platypus, a “missing link” which, we’re informed, was widely considered to be a fake when preserved examples first began appearing in Britain from Australia during the 18th century. It’s understandable: a furry duck? A mammal that lays eggs?
Though the theme of evolution continues to crop up elsewhere, the library then goes on to explore five mass extinction events, the most recent of which was around 65m years ago.
This includes objects such as a Devonshire woolly mammoth tusk, Parisian sea snails and a slab of preserved sea floor from the deep, dark waters of what’s now Shropshire.
This epic story of the world around us continues with plant illustrations, a fist-sized West African goliath beetle, Eadweard Muybridge’s animal locomotion studies, an aardvark, a flying lemur, a dog bat, dog skulls, bird’s heads, 27 guillemot eggs, pickled woodlice, an emperor penguin, lava and herbarium sheets.
Unanswered questions
New stories unfold again and again – fragments of the Canyon Diablo meteorite, which fell 50,000 years ago, tell us that the earth is 4.5 billion years old; archived lichen helps us to study pollution levels; while specimens bought back from HMS Challenger’s historic expedition of the 1870s show how oceans have changed, giving new life and importance to ageing samples.
Walking from one bay to the next, there’s a lot of information to digest, though the introductions can prompt unanswered questions. For example, we’re told that plants are used for medical cures, but which plants? And which cures? Could we have seen some modern examples?
While the gallery sets out to tell nature’s story through bite-sized, digestible chapters, Nature’s Library also weaves another tale.
This second layer explores the history and culture of collecting and the development of museums – from how wealthy, passionate and obsessive individuals amassed collections, to the formation of societies and collections within educational establishments, and the eventual creation of public museums.
It also touches on how collections were categorised and reorganised. By displaying tools for learning, such as dissected and preserved creatures, enlarged flower models and beautifully crafted late-19th-century glass sea anemones, the gallery underlines the historic educational element.
It is also acknowledged that collecting can be a dirty business, crossing a legal line and contributing to scarcity and, therefore, value.
Accessible science
So it’s from this myriad of smaller collections, random donations and selected purchases, built up over time, that this mass of curious cabinets come.
Sadly, the library analogy doesn’t quite stretch to borrowing stuffed primates (and it’s best to ignore the highly contentious idea that libraries themselves are now just museums for books).
Yet with Nature’s Library, the UK’s largest university museum has succeeded in giving what is clearly a bewildering, monumental and fragmented collection an easy-to-navigate structure, with a well-balanced mix of accessible science and weird wonder.
Dave Freak is a writer, editor and arts consultant based in the West Midlands Manchester Museum employs the idea of a library as a metaphor for presenting its sizeable natural history collection
Project data
- Cost £250,000
- Main funders DCMS/Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund; J Paul Getty Jr Charitable Trust; The Pilgrim Trust; Sir Siegmund Warburg’s Voluntary Settlement; The John Spedan Lewis Foundation
- Curators David Gelsthorpe (lead curator) Henry McGhie
- Exhibition design Nissen Richards Studio
- Graphics Nick Bell Design
- Lighting ZNA
