Victoria Gallery and Museum
Maja Lorkowska, Exhibitions Editor
Victoria Gallery and Museum is a collection of art and artefacts from the University of Liverpool. Housed in an Alfred Waterhouse-designed, Grade II-listed building, it was completed in 1892 and is a wonderful companion to his Refuge Assurance Building (now The Principal Hotel) built during the same period in Manchester. It’s worth a visit for the architecture alone however the collections inside are equally inspiring.
The eclectic displays feature fine art, silver, furniture, sculpture, ceramics, fossils, scientific equipment and zoological specimens as part of the permanent exhibitions (if the “world’s most important display of false teeth” and dinosaur footprints from the North West aren’t reason enough to visit then we don’t know what is) but there are temporary shows too. In the past, the Victoria Gallery and Museum hosted one of the Liverpool Biennial exhibitions, local photographers’ work and works by Yinka Shonibare, Fion Gunn and Granby Workshop.
Fun fact: the Victoria Building’s red bricks and decorative terracotta dressings were what inspired the term ‘red brick university’, coined by professor Edgar Allison Peers.
A walk around the Gallery’s Abercromby Square surroundings is also recommended. From here, you will see the Metropolitan Cathedral which is always worth a visit, and the gifts of Hope Street are also just down the road.
Check the website before you visit as the Museum or parts of it are sometimes closed for repairs and exhibition changeovers, perhaps a little more often than other museums – the building’s long history may have something to do with it..
