Discovery museum

I have so many fond memories of visiting the Discovery museum as a child and playing with the experiments on the top floor. As a teenager I remembered the museum but not where it was! When I moved back to Newcastle I re-discovered this museum and was delighted to see that it had had considerable money invested into it in recent years (£13 million in 2004). Its great to see such a place being enjoyed for free. These days my favourite exhibitions are those about local history and the people of Newcastle. I would recommend a visit by anyone who lives in the area.

The building which houses the Discovery museum is beautiful, I remember even as a kid noticing how grand it was (however then we entered a small doorway at the front of the building with an ornately tiled little entrance that had sugar free lolly pops for sale rather than the glass extension to the right of the building which was only added in 1995). The gorgeous building with delightful green turrets was built in 1899 as the Co-op wholesale society headquarters for the Northern region. The Museum took over the building in 1979. Since 1934 the museum had been housed in a temporary pavilion in the exhibition park and was the first science museum outside of London in the UK.

Today, I had to go into town and got a view of the museum from the 9th floor of the car park. Shame about all the other shabby buildings around, although the new science centre being built nearby should give the area a good boost.