The museum opened in 1974 in Moorside Mills at Eccleshill, a worsted spinning mill that had stopped producing yarn. Bradford had been losing mills steadily for decades; this one was saved by being turned inside out. The city kept the building, the machinery in it, and the surrounding mill manager's house and stables, and converted the lot into a working museum of what Bradford had been for the previous century. You can still watch the looms run. The displays follow a fleece through every stage of becoming a suit: from raw wool to washed wool, from carded to combed to spun, from woven to dyed to tailored. In a stable behind the mill, a blacksmith's workshop and farriery display, complete with horseshoes and anvils, remembers the world the mill workers walked to work from.

The transport collection is half the museum's draw. Bradford had horse-drawn trams from 1882, steam trams from 1883, and electric trams from 1898. Trolleybuses ran through the city from 1911 until 1972, longer than in almost any other British town. The museum holds a Bradford trolleybus, a Wallis and Steevens Advance steam roller built in 1928 and owned by the Bradford City Council roads department, with the council crest still painted on the water tanks, and tram number 237, built in Shipley in 1904. Tram 237 is displayed in its 1912 condition with the top deck extended and covered to seat thirty-eight, restricted on its routes because it was too tall to clear the railway bridge at Eccleshill station. The museum's transport gallery is a direct line into the daily commute of a Bradford weaver.

Some of the most interesting machines in the museum are the smallest. The hand loom with a witch, an early form of dobby mechanism, is the kind that cloth designers kept in the mills to develop new fabric patterns. The witch lifts the shafts; weights below pull them down; up to fifty shafts can be operated to produce complicated patterns. The weft is fed in by hand using John Kay's flying shuttle, invented in 1733, with multiple colours fed through Robert Kay's 1760 shuttle box. The same kind of looms are still used in university textile departments. Many of the woven fabrics in modern production were first developed on machines like these, by designers working out a pattern at small scale before committing to a wider loom.

The museum runs Victorian classroom sessions, washday workshops, and a yearly Christmas craft market done in proper Victorian style. Temporary exhibitions rotate through the upper galleries: a motorcycle show in 2003, a rag-rug display in 2009, an exhibit of Masonic regalia from 2013 to 2014 that included a robe worn by Sarastro in the Royal Opera House production of Mozart's The Magic Flute. In early 2025, the museum displayed restored furniture, signage and artwork from Fountains Cafe, a Bradford institution that had served the Oastler Centre for fifty-five years before closing in 2023. The choice is telling. The Industrial Museum is not just about giant steam engines. It is about the texture of everyday Bradford, the small businesses and Victorian mornings and tram rides that built the city around them.