Museum of Science & Industry (MOSI)

Website: http://www.mosi.org.uk

Entrance into Manchester across Water Street

MOSI occupies the former Liverpool Road station opened in 1830, and the world's oldest surviving railway station. The museum, founded in 1969, opened on its current site on 15 September 1983, the 153rd anniversary of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.

MOSI’s galleries and outstanding collections, housed in five listed buildings, tell the story of Manchester as the world’s first industrial city. Textiles were a core part of this industrial success. The collections focus on Manchester’s scientific and industrial past, present and future with collections ranging from familiar domestic appliances to unfamiliar manufacturing machinery and scientific instruments.

The museum also collects textile samples and pattern books that trace the history of the Manchester textile industry from the time of the transatlantic slave trade. Samples of printed cottons were exported from Manchester to many parts of the world as part of the triangular trade, the enslavement of Africans and the production of slave-grown cotton.