Bolton Museum

Bolton Museum sits in the civic heart of Bolton, inside the grade II listed Le Mans Crescent building next to the town hall. It shares its main entrance with Bolton Central Library in a purpose-built civic centre. The museum grew from a small collection of fossils donated in 1853 to a large public institution. Dr Samuel Taylor Chadwick left £5000 in 1876 to create a free-entry natural history museum in Queens Park. After the Chadwick Museum opened in 1884, its collections moved to the Le Mans site in 1956. The building also houses one of Britain’s oldest public aquariums, opened in 1941. The museum’s holdings include over 10,000 archaeological objects, one of the largest regional collections in the UK. Significant donations came from private collectors such as Caroline Birley and Stand Grammar School. The Egyptology section features textiles, animal mummies and fragmentary sculpture from Egypt and Sudan. Archaeological finds range from Swiss lake dwellings to Aztec material and Pre-Columbian mummies. In 2018 the museum received £3.8 million to update its displays. A forgery by Shaun Greenhalgh entered the collection in 2006 before being exposed. Visitors find natural history, Egyptology and art galleries arranged over several floors. The aquarium displays marine life in a historic setting. Two branch museums remain open: Hall i’ th’ Wood, restored in 1902, and Smithills Hall with its nature trail. The Chadwick Resource Centre stores around 60,000 objects for research. Local history and archives occupy a dedicated gallery within the same building. The civic centre’s architecture, designed by Bradshaw Gass & Hope, frames the museum’s varied collections.