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Manchester’s historic connections to slavery will be at the heart of a major new exhibition

It'll be opening in early 2027.

Emily Sergeant - 21st January 2025

Manchester’s historic connections to slavery are to be explored during a major new exhibition coming soon to the city.

The Science and Industry Museum, in the heart of our city centre, is already known and loved for telling the story of the ideas and innovations that transformed Manchester into the world’s first industrial city.

But now, a new free exhibition is set to “enhance public understanding” of how transatlantic slavery actually shaped the city’s growth.

Produced by the Science and Industry Museum, in partnership with The Scott Trust Legacies of Enslavement programme, and developed with African descendent and diaspora communities through local and global collaborations, this landmark project will put Manchester’s historic connections to enslavement at the heart of a major exhibition at the museum for the first time.  

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Featuring new research, it will also explore how the legacies of these histories continue to impact Manchester, the world, and lives today.

Set to open in early 2027, the exhibition will run for a year in the museum’s Special Exhibitions Gallery.

Alongside that hub at the Science and Industry Museum itself, the project is also set to have a collaborative city-wide events programme, and a lasting legacy – with a new permanent schools programme, and permanent displays in the future too.

As mentioned, the new exhibition is part of The Scott Trust Legacies of Enslavement programme, which is a 10-year restorative justice project launched in 2023.

Through partnerships and community programmes, the project aims to improve public understanding of the impact of transatlantic slavery on the UK’s economic development, and its ongoing legacies for Black communities – with a strong focus on Manchester, the city in which The Guardian was founded back in 1821.

The museum’s existing gallery content and ongoing work around sharing the inextricable links between Manchester’s growth into an industrial powerhouse and a textile industry reliant on colonialism and enslavement will be developed through the project.

Through a “collaborative re-examination of the past”, the exhibition will also share a more inclusive history of a city that prides itself on being at the forefront of ideas that change the world.

Speaking ahead of the exhibition’s arrival in early 2027, Sally MacDonald, who is the Director of the Science and Industry Museum, says: “This will be an exhibition about important aspects of our past that are profoundly relevant to the world we live in today.

“Revealed from the perspectives of those who experienced enslavement and whose lives have been shaped by its legacies, we will foreground stories of resistance, agency, and skill.

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“The exhibition will explore themes of resilience, identity and creativity alongside exploitation and inequality, and will feature a specific focus on the ways that scientific and technological developments both drove and were driven by transatlantic slavery.”

Further details on the project will be announced in due course, so stay tuned.

Featured Image – Science Museum Group