Thackray Museum

The award-winning Thackray Museum is one of the UK’s leading museums, telling the story of medicine and explaining how advances in medicine have changed our lives.

The museum is a fantastic day out, transporting you into a living experience of health and medicine, past, present and future. It’s an inspiring visit for families, children and groups of all ages with plenty of fun and interaction.

One of the most popular activities for visitors is taking a walk down a back street of Victorian Leeds, complete with authentic sights, sounds and smells. There’s the opportunity to follow the life of a Victorian character in “Living Health” where you can follow the lives, ailments and treatments of eight Victorian characters – you make the choices that determine their survival, amongst the rats, fleas and bedbugs!

You can step inside the human body to find out how your body works at the Life Zone!, a brand new interactive children’s gallery. When you find out how amazing your body is, you’ll want to keep it that way!

The museum has two temporary exhibition galleries and in 2006, you can see whether the bionic man is really science fiction in ‘Body Parts: New for Old’ and uncover the secrets of DNA in ‘Molecules for Life’.

The museum project was the vision of Paul Thackray, a former director and major shareholder of the Leeds - based international medical supplies company Chas F Thackray Ltd. On the sale of the company in 1990 Paul Thackray established a charitable trust, with the objective of establishing a medical museum, based upon the collection that he started in 1985 as an archive of the company. The museum was then established as a charitable company with a strong commercial framework.

The museum opened on 25th March 1997 following seven years of planning and an investment of nearly £5 million. The Heritage Lottery Fund provided a grant of £3 million, the remainder was raised from private and charitable donations. The original idea of a small medical museum which described an overall history of medicine grew into a major commercial visitor attraction aimed at a wide audience with particular emphasis on education.

A large, Grade 2 listed, former workhouse building was leased from St. James’s Hospital in Leeds and building works commenced in January 1996. The collection has continued to grow and now holds over 35,000 objects and 14,500 books and catalogues. In order to ensure the museum’s sustainability the scheme included a high quality conference centre, catering facility and retail outlet. All of these components continue to thrive in a highly competitive climate.

Since opening in 1997 the museum has been the UK’s Museum of the Year, England’s Visitor Attraction of the Year, maintained the Sandford Award for Heritage Education and has been shortlisted for European Museum of the Year. All of these awards are considered to be the pinnacle in their fields.

The Thackray Museum is an independent charity which receives no regular external funding from local or national government. Its continued success is down to its complementary commercial activities and the popular support it has received year on year from educational visits and the general public.