Urbis, Manchester

The Urbis is an exhibition centre about city life. On your visit you can explore exhibitions about contemporary art & design, music, fashion, popular culture and the people who make our cities what they are.

There is a lovely little gift shop on the ground floor and you can also make the most of your visit by relaxing in the Social or sipping a delicious cocktail in the Modern, the new bar and restaurant.

It is a fantastic modern building which dominates the skyline although it does look as though it's a space ship which has just landed in the middle of the City!

2 more images

The Urbis is extremely pleasing to the eye.
This area outside of Manchester Victoria station was bombed by the IRA some years ago - fortunately nobody was killed. However it spurred a re-development to take place and we have The Urbis.
John Lewis is based here. This is another building i have not yet been inside - i guess i must spend most of my time in Manchester just walking around and looking at the buildings from the outside.
Enjoy the pictures of The Urbis

4 more images

One brilliant example of what to do with money and will - raise social consciousness and ask the big questions.

England's penetrating auto-critique made manifest in this wonderful museum of city culture - exploring the relation of man to his urban enviroms....

What was once a car park is now Cathedral Gardens, with lawns lapping up against the Corn Exchange, cathedral, Chetham's School of Music and the ultra-cool Urbis.

Urbis is a museum of city living where flashy gizmos convey the pace of urban development, letting you walk the streets of cities around the globe. Manchester after all was the first industrial city, which means it is now at the forefront of the post-industrial age. Some of this historical fact is conveyed by the exhibits, but mostly it's a noisy concoction of gadgets where the buzz of interaction has overtaken any educational content.

Urbis is now FREE! It is open 10-6 daily, open late on Saturday till 8. An admission fee is sometimes charged for the temporary exhibitions which are kept on a separate floor.

The ground floor gallery hosts changing exhibitions (free) as does the first floor gallery (£££). The shop is kooky and fun. It's also worth going in to see the indoor funicular in action (a glass lift that ascends at an angle ).

An unusual recent addition to the Manchester skyline is the Urbis museum.

"Interactive exhibits explore cities around the world from Tokyo to Paris revealing how different cities work, how they change and how they change us" -- that's what the leaflet says and that's what it does really.

I found some of the interactive exhibits interesting and some not so interesting but of course it's personal opinion -- and to me there seems to be quite a lot of space unused -- but it's proved a popular museum and is worth a visit.

It's open daily from 10am to 6pm.

Admission to the general museum is free but there may be a charge to some temporary exhibitions.

This is a great museum, especially because its free!!
The museum gives an insight to how Manchester was 100 years ago and Manchester is going to be in the future. An interesting day out and gives you the chance to find out more about the place you are visiting. There are also lots of fun games for you to take part in as you go around the different sections of the museum.
Well worth the Visit

Free museums are always fun, especially the Urbis. It's a rather interactive museum about Urban areas, Cities.. Several aspects of citylife are highlighted, form CCTV to strange laws to create order in the chaos of citylife.

Urbis is Manchester's museum of city life. Its situated close to Victoria Station, which is a fine example of the grand local architecture, stemming from Manchester's days as the workhouse of the world. You cannot miss Urbis, which reminds me of a gigantic shark's fin. Its a great building and a testament to the vision of the people who sought to rebuild Manchester after a deveastating IRA bomb badly damaged the city centre (if you wrong further along Cross Street you will see the red Royal Mail box that withstood the force of the blast that occurred next to it).

I like the exterior of Urbis a lot more than the interior. The displays are imaginative and avant-garde, but this runs the risk of indifference and alienation. I like to think of myself as fairly open-minded and inquisitive, but Urbis left me cold. Definitely check the building out though and relax in Cathedral Park, Manchester's first new public park in decades.

The permanent exhibition is free, and temporary displays are in the range of 3 to 5 pounds.