Great North Museum: Hancock

The Great North Museum: Hancock stands on Newcastle University’s campus beside Barras Bridge. Its Victorian building, extended in 2009, houses natural history and ancient civilisations under one roof. The museum began in 1884 as the Hancock Museum, merging later with university collections. Owned by the Natural History Society of Northumbria, it is run by North East Museums for Newcastle University. The site sits above a Second World War air-raid shelter linked to the Victoria Tunnel. The museum’s origins reach back to 1780 when Marmaduke Tunstall gathered natural and ethnographic objects. A wombat specimen from this early collection remains on display. Founding members included the Hancock brothers, Joshua Alder and Prideaux John Selby. William Armstrong donated £11,500 in the 1880s to build the present structure. After a £26 million refurbishment it reopened in 2009 with new galleries, a planetarium and interactive zones. The reopening drew over 400,000 visitors in its first months and reached one million by 2010. Inside, visitors find a life-size African elephant cast, two Egyptian mummies and a full-size T-Rex skeleton. The Living Planet gallery shows wildlife from the northeast and beyond. Hands-on areas like ‘Explore’ let younger visitors touch specimens and join sessions. The Bio-Wall displays hundreds of creatures with details of their habitats. Temporary exhibitions such as Dippy the dinosaur have drawn long queues. The museum’s archives preserve nineteenth-century records alongside historic taxidermy and geological specimens.