Africa Hub at Manchester Museum is a gallery interior refurbishment that creates a new space for exhibitions and community-led archival research as the museum tries to better understand its Africa collection - some 40,000 items from across Africa, many of which were traded, collected, and looted during the British Empire.
Located above the Egypt & Sudan Gallery within one of the museum's historic Victorian galleries, the project transforms a previously underused exhibition space into an environment where conversations around history, restitution and cultural memory can take place in a setting that is both welcoming and open.
The proposal works with the existing architecture of the museum, recognising the qualities of its vaulted ceilings, masonry columns and generous proportions. The intervention is deliberately light-touch, using colour, furniture and graphics as architectural tools that reveal the heritage fabric of the building. Existing display cases, benches and architectural elements are retained and carefully adapted, allowing the museum's history to remain legible while establishing a distinct new identity for the Africa Hub. A family of bespoke furniture pieces creates a series of intimate spaces within the larger gallery. Built-in seating, discussion tables and display elements define places for gathering without interrupting the openness of the historic hall. These "mini architectures" establish varying scales of occupation, allowing visitors to move between moments of collective discussion, quiet reflection and object-based research while remaining visually connected to the wider gallery. Colour is employed as an architectural material strategically applied across walls, columns, furniture and display cases. This approach reshapes the perception of the existing space while respecting its historic character. Developed alongside the project's graphic identity, the palette creates rhythm, orientation and moments of emphasis, transforming familiar museum interiors into a civic environment that feels contemporary, confident and distinctly connected to the stories of the African collections.
An overlooked corridor that previously functioned only as a route between galleries is transformed into the threshold of the Africa Hub. Through colour, graphics, seating and interpretation, this passage becomes a place to pause and encounter the collection before entering the main gallery, changing movement through the museum into a meaningful arrival experience. Within the gallery itself, the corners of the existing plan are reimagined as spaces for conversation. These spaces will be used for workshops with community curators – members of communities whose heritage are represented in the Museum’s collection.
Graphic Design: Malice Studio
Build: Manchester Museum
Photography: © Matthew Blunderfield