Leicester Museum & Art Gallery

The Leicester Museum & Art Gallery is a special place in the city of Leicester, England. It opened its doors in 1849, making it one of the first public museums in the whole United Kingdom. The museum is filled with interesting things about science, history, and art from all over the world and right in Leicester too.

The building where the museum lives was designed by Joseph Hansom, who also created the famous hansom cab. Over the years, the museum has grown with new parts added, the last one in 2011. You can find it on New Walk, just a short walk from the city centre. It’s a wonderful place to explore and learn new things every day.

Major exhibits

Leicester Museum & Art Gallery has many interesting permanent exhibits. You can see models of ancient dinosaurs, an Egyptian area, minerals from Leicestershire, and a special fossil called Charnia. There is also a wildspace area with stuffed animals from all over the world.

The museum has a big collection of fossils of animals that lived long ago. Two important skeletons are always on display — a cetiosaur found in Rutland and a plesiosaur from Barrow upon Soar. The museum also shows the first ever Charnia fossil found, which was discovered in Charnwood Forest by a schoolboy named Roger Mason in 1957.

The museum has four Egyptian mummies on display. These mummies tell us about life in ancient Egypt long ago. The Egypt area of the museum was made bigger recently so more items can be shown to visitors.

Other

The museum has a stuffed polar bear, named Peppy, which is the mascot of Fox's Glacier Mints. It is part of a collection of animals preserved for display, gathered from many parts of the world.

The museum also holds an important collection of art from Germany, with works by famous artists like George Grosz, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee. These pieces were saved before World War II when they were not allowed in Nazi Germany. In 2007, the museum showed over 100 ceramic artworks by Picasso that were donated by Richard Attenborough.

Exhibitions

On the first floor of the Leicester Museum & Art Gallery, there is an area where exhibits change from time to time. Some past exhibits have included a special display about the search for the remains of Richard III, a fun display about Wallace and Gromit, and a show called Spirits of War to Hands of Peace, which had paintings and sculptures about the sadness of war and the importance of peace.

During the summer of 2019, a portrait of Richard III was shown as part of a project called 'Coming Home' from the National Portrait Gallery. This happened after the king was buried in Leicester Cathedral in 2015.

Name change

In August 2020, the museum reopened after being closed for a long time because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It now has a new name: Leicester Museum & Art Gallery. This name was chosen to show that it is the main museum in Leicester and to help people from other places find it more easily when they search online.