Exhibition

Science and Industry Museum partners with The Guardian on slavery exhibition

Image: Science and Industry Museum (The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum)

The new exhibition will explore Manchester’s cotton and slavery connections through collaboration with African and Caribbean diaspora communities, launching 2027

A partnership between The Guardian and Manchester’s Science and Industry Museum will see the creation of a new free exhibition about the links between the city, cotton and transatlantic slavery.

In 2023 The Guardian Media Group launched a 10-year restorative justice project, aimed to improve public understanding of the impact of transatlantic slavery on the UK’s economic development, and its ongoing legacies for Black communities – with a strong focus on Manchester, the city in which the Guardian was founded.

Known as The Scott Trust Legacies of Enslavement programme, it was launched after publishing connections between the founders of the Manchester Guardian and transatlantic slavery.

The project saw researchers from the Wilberforce Institute carry out research, and a series of academic reports highlighted the publication’s historic links with slavery and stories of the enslaved.

As part of the project, in 2027 an exhibition is planned, to be produced in partnership with the Science and Industry Museum, and developed with African descendant and diaspora communities through local and global collaborations.

The name of the exhibition has not yet been announced, but The Guardian said it will “put the city’s historic connections to enslavement at the heart of a major exhibition at the museum for the first time.”

It is set to run for a year in the Science and Industry Museum’s Special Exhibitions Gallery, formerly part of Liverpool Road Station, through which cotton produced by enslaved people once flowed.

Sally MacDonald, director of the Science and Industry Museum, said: “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.”

Katharine Viner, editor-in-chief, Guardian News & Media, said the exhibition had been announced two years before launch so it can work with the city’s communities to shape the exhibition.

Viner said: “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.”