Science and Industry Museum teams up with Guardian newspaper on slavery exhibition

Manchester’s Science and Industry Museum has announced a new partnership with the Guardian newspaper that aims to enhance public understanding of the how the city was shaped by transatlantic slavery.

The museum will work with the newspaper and its Scott Trust Legacies of Enslavement Programme to conduct new research on the legacies of slavery, develop existing gallery content, and create a free exhibition focused on the city’s historic connections to enslavement.

The Guardian's Legacies of Enslavement programme was set up in 2023 after the newspaper's owner, the Scott Trust, commissioned an academic study that revealed links between cotton merchant John Edward Taylor, who founded the title, and the transatlantic slave trade.

Following the study the trust issued an apology for Taylor’s role in enslavement and launched a decade-long programme of restorative justice aimed at improving public understanding of the impact of transatlantic slavery on the UK’s economic development, and its ongoing legacies for Black communities.

The initiative has a strong focus on Manchester, the city in which the Guardian was founded.

The upcoming exhibition will be produced by the Science and Industry Museum in partnership with the Legacies of Enslavement programme and developed with African descendent and diaspora communities through local and global collaborations.   

Due to open in early 2027, the exhibition will run for a year in the Science and Industry Museum’s Special Exhibitions Gallery. Cotton produced by enslaved people once flowed through the historic railway site on Liverpool Road that is now occupied by the museum.

The project will feature a collaborative city-wide events programme and aims to leave a long-term legacy, with a new permanent schools programme and permanent displays planned in future. 

“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,” said the museum's director Sally MacDonald.

“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 of the Guardian, said: “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.”