"Underground Manchester" at the Greater Manchester Museum of Science and Industry

Abstract

Underground is a new permanent exhibition in rapidly expanding Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. Its subject is water and sewerage of Manchester and, more broadly, history and culture of modern public health engineering. Developed by a team led by Alan Wilson, with designers Deborah Conibear and Nadine Bell and model maker Colin Buckman, exhibit opened in spring 1988, financed by museum and North West Water, regional water utility. Underground is truly underground. One enters by descending into cavernous brick warehouses beneath Liverpool Road Station, eastern terminus of George Stephenson's pioneering Liverpool & Manchester Railway, and entire exhibit is housed in a winding tunnel beneath station. The visitor's first impression is aural: before there is anything to be seen but a descending staircase, one hears drone of an Anglican funeral service interspersed with what 19th-century doctors would have called a productive cough. Turning a corner at bottom, one faces a diorama: a child's funeral in 19th-century Manchester. It brings one face-to-face with problem that is exhibit's focus: unhealthy environment of rapidly growing industrial city, and corresponding magnitude of technical achievements that have so greatly diminished effect of what Victorian sanitarians called the filth diseases.