The best: Free days out around Manchester in January

Open daily and completely free to visit, the Science and Industry Museum provides a warm and absorbing escape from winter weather throughout the month.

The recently reopened Power Hall: The Andrew Law Gallery brings the sights, sounds and stories of energy and industry to life, with towering historic engines and interactive challenges designed to get visitors thinking like engineers.

Elsewhere, the Textiles Gallery explores Manchester’s global cotton legacy through live machinery demonstrations and stories of labour and exploitation, while Revolution Manchester charts the city’s impact on science, transport and creativity, from early Rolls-Royce motorcars to the isolation of graphene. Families can also enjoy immersive science in the Experiment Gallery, alongside the intimate exhibition Stephen Hawking at Work, offering rare insight into the physicist’s working life.

The National Trust takes over the city skyline with Mosschester, a new public programme celebrating the overlooked but vital role of moss in Greater Manchester’s natural heritage. Set against the striking backdrop of Castlefield Viaduct, the University of Manchester’s MossWorlds exhibition explores the historical, present-day and future importance of mosses through art, music and poetry.

Blending science with creative responses, the exhibition invites visitors to rethink the quiet ecosystems growing beneath their feet, while enjoying one of the city’s most distinctive elevated green spaces.

Step back in time to the Late Cretaceous Period and meet one of the most recognisable dinosaurs of all time at Manchester Museum’s immersive exhibition exploring the life and legacy of the iconic horned herbivore.

Designed for all ages, Eat, Roam, Repeat invites visitors to become budding palaeontologists, uncovering how the Triceratops lived, what it ate and how it survived over sixty-six million years ago.

Interactive highlights include a digital touch replica of a Triceratops skull, hands-on fossil digs and atmospheric displays evoking the prehistoric world it once inhabited. At the centre of the exhibition is a rare, 1.9-metre-long Triceratops skull, in Manchester for a limited time only.

Manchester Art Gallery continues to host a rich programme of free exhibitions suitable for art connoisseurs and creative families alike.

The fascinating ongoing installation Trading Station: How Hot Drinks Shape Our Lives traces the global histories of tea, coffee and chocolate, exploring their links to trade, design, colonisation and ethical consumption through four centuries of objects, artworks and decorative design.

Families with very young children can also explore Things of the Least, a lively exhibition shaped around how babies and toddlers interact with objects in gallery spaces. Featuring objects from the Mary Greg Collection alongside playful structures, films and drawings, the exhibition challenges traditional ideas of value, display and whose voices belong in museums.

Check out the rest of the collections and upcoming events at Manchester Art Gallery below.

For a dose of wintry wartime intrigue, IWM North’s free and family-friendly exhibition Spies, Lies and Deception uncovers the captivating cloak-and-dagger world of espionage from the First World War to the present day.

Families can get up close with ingenious spy gadgets, discover stories of daring deception and visit the Mission Room, where young guests can solve clues and test their undercover skills.

The exhibition includes real artefacts, from hollow batteries used to hide film and pencils concealing blades to matchboxes designed for secret messages and more.

On display until the end of February, Peter James Houghton’s acrylic landscapes take over The Modernist with stark, evocative paintings exploring societal decline, isolation and nostalgia in the post-information age. Depicting condemned housing estates, vacant shopping precincts and fading seaside architecture in all their atrophied brutalism, the works present buildings as silent witnesses to lost working-class communities.

Rendered in hazy, suspended moments, these unsettling scenes reflect on memory, neglect and the precariousness of the future. All works are available for sale.

Down in Stockport, dedicated project space PINK presents The Vessel, a site-specific installation by Chris Thompson that transforms the gallery’s second-floor into a shifting, multifaceted environment.

Part sculpture, part archive and part stage set, the work centres on a large wooden structure filled with drawers containing objects, sound and video, forming a narrative that resists and recalibrates straightforward interpretation.

Presented as the work of a fictional DIY collector during the creation of their own personal museum, The Vessel encourages visitors to open drawers, explore compartments and engage with one another. A programme of free public events will run alongside the installation, with details announced via PINK’s Instagram.

For those willing to brave the cold, January is an ideal time to explore the diverse array of stunning landscapes just beyond the city, with a welcome combination of sweeping drama and off-season solitude. The Pennines and Peak District are within easy reach by train or car, offering rewarding winter walks with sweeping views.

Highlights include Kinder Scout, the highest point in the Peak District, with routes from Edale or Hayfield, and Mam Tor’s celebrated ridge walk near Castleton. Pendle Hill provides a short but atmospheric climb steeped in folklore, while Bleaklow offers a longer, more remote challenge across boggy moorland. Closer to home, Shutlingsloe in Macclesfield Forest and the varied trails at Lyme Park offer accessible routes with excellent views.

Be sure to plan ahead, check conditions and wear appropriate footwear before setting off.

Check out our full round-up of the best mountain and hill walks around the region below.