Hancock Museum (Newcastle)

I thought it was very poor and would not visit again. Most items on display were either copies, reproductions, casts, models, or duplicates, including plastic fish and an elephant. If you like being spoon fed this is the place to go. The lighting was so bad is some cases you could not see the item on display. Coins were so far from the glass you could not see them. There is obviously a structural fault upstairs as items in cases wobbled alarmingly as people walked by. Lettering was already worn off of some signage. Why animals in a museum? It's not a zoo! not that they were there (quarantined). You could not hear dialogue from information points because it was so ...  Read the complete review

Where do I start? OK so after 3 years and £26 million was it worth the wait? Not in my opinion. Having visited with my 2 children only a matter of days from opening I, and they, were very dissapointed. OK, so it was in the middle of the school holidays and entryt is free therefore I was expecting it to be busy. And Boy was it Busy!! Although the queue was lengthy we were processed quickly and entered via the original frontage of a once fine museum. Upon entering the first thing that greets you is one of the 2 shops and therefore the kids were asking for keepsakes before we'd actually seen ...  Read the complete review

The Hancock is in its own way a quirky museum which houses a combination of permanent exhibitions (birds and Egyptians etc.) with temporary exhibitions. The museum has actually been closed for several years now in a massive restoration project which will see it reopen soon. Its reopening should be exciting since it is a great rainy day location which never gets old, not even the permanent exhibitions. I mentioned quirky because the museum has had an all manner of exhibitions from dinosaurs to Buffy the vampire slayer. The variety of these exhibitions helps contribute to its longevity and also makes it that bit easier to get reluctant kids into a ...  Read the complete review

**A Little bit of History** The museum in its present site was opened in1884 and is as such quite a "monument" in Newcastle. The museum first started in 1780s when Marmaduke Tunstall started to collect natural history material from all over the world, and when he died, his collection was bought by George Allan of Darlington, in 1791. The collections were soon too extensive for the building and the new museum was opened on its present site in 1884, and when the well known naturalist John Hancock died in 1890, the museum was named after him. **Where is it** The museum is located in the city centre, between Barras Bridge ...  Read the complete review