The Science and Industry Museum to explore links between Manchester, cotton and transatlantic slavery

The Science and Industry Museum has unveiled details of a brand-new major exhibition that will explore the links between Manchester, cotton and transatlantic slavery.

The landmark free exhibition and public engagement project seeks to enhance public understanding of how transatlantic slavery shaped the city’s growth. Featuring new research, it will also examine how the legacies of these histories continue to impact Manchester, the world and lives today.

Beyond this, it 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 reexamination of the past.

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

Opening 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.

As part of the project, the programme will deliver a collaborative city-wide events programme and lasting legacy, and includes a new permanent schools programme and permanent future displays.

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.

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. “

Read more about the Science and Industry Museum’s new exhibition here.