Manchester’s Science and Industry Museum is to host a major exhibition to reveal links between Manchester, cotton and transatlantic slavery
In partnership with the Scott Trust Legacies of Enslavement Programme and announced at an event last night the landmark free exhibition and public engagement project will enhance public understanding of how transatlantic slavery shaped the city’s growth.
Featuring new research, it will also explore how the legacies of these histories continue to impact Manchester, the world, and lives today.
Opening in early 2027, the exhibition will run for a year in the Science and Industry Museum’s Special Exhibitions Gallery. Formerly part of Liverpool Road Station, cotton produced by enslaved people once flowed through the historic railway site now occupied by the museum.
The project will have a collaborative city-wide events programme and a lasting legacy, with a new permanent schools programme and permanent displays in the future.
The work is part of The Scott Trust Legacies of Enslavement programme, 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.
It will develop the museum’s existing gallery content and ongoing and growing work around researching and sharing the inextricable links between Manchester’s growth into an industrial powerhouse and a textile industry reliant on colonialism and enslavement.
The exhibition will share a more inclusive history of a city that prides itself on being at the forefront of ideas that change the world, through a collaborative re-examination of the past.
Sally MacDonald, Director of the Science and Industry Museum says
“We have a unique opportunity to create an exhibition which delivers a powerful story about our shared history and its legacies, delivered with research input and support from the Scott Trust, who are responding to their own organisation’s historic connections to enslavement. 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. 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. “
Katharine Viner, editor-in-chief, Guardian News & Media says
“Many of the Guardian’s 19th century founders profited from transatlantic enslavement, principally through Manchester’s role in the cotton industry. A fundamental part of our restorative justice work in response is focused on the region and our aim is to build greater awareness and a deeper understanding of the city’s historical links to transatlantic enslavement. This partnership with the Science and Industry Museum will combine knowledge and experience of Manchester with thoughtful collaboration that will be vital to serve the communities most impacted by these lasting legacies. We are announcing two years before launch so that we can work with the city’s communities – particularly those of Caribbean and African descent – to shape the exhibition.”
