Qualla: Bristol Museum & Art Gallery

Bristol Museum & Art Gallery: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vaughan Collection, Public domain. In June 2009 a secret exhibition opened in Bristol. No press release, no advance billing, just an extra 70 works of art slipped into the existing galleries of Bristol Museum & Art Gallery. Animatronic chicken nuggets pecking in a cage. A penguin on a snow-cone. A burned-out ice cream van. Banksy versus Bristol Museum, his largest show ever, drew enormous queues to the museum's grand Edwardian entrance the moment word leaked. The museum had pulled off the impossible: a Banksy exhibition that not even the curators' partners knew was coming.

Image: Vaughan Collection | Public domain

Bristol Museum & Art Gallery: An Edwardian gift

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK, CC BY 2.0. The museum's origins lie in 1823, when the Bristol Institution for the Advancement of Science and Art opened in a neoclassical building at the bottom of Park Street, designed by Sir Charles Robert Cockerell, the same architect who later completed the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambrid...

Image: Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK | CC BY 2.0

Bristol Museum & Art Gallery: The bomb that gutted the museum

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rodw, Public domain. On the night of 24-25 November 1940, during the Bristol Blitz, a bomb hit the old Venetian Gothic museum building. The fire that followed destroyed about 17,000 of its natural history specimens, a loss that took the collection generations to rebuild. The 1930 art gallery extensio...

Image: Rodw | Public domain

Bristol Museum & Art Gallery: What's inside

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Francis Danby, Public domain. A replica Bristol Boxkite biplane hangs from the main hall ceiling, built in 1963 for the film Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. Below it sprawl the museum's designated collections, granted special national status for outstanding importance: geology, Eastern art, an...

Image: Francis Danby | Public domain

Bristol Museum & Art Gallery: Theft, reckoning, regeneration

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK, CC BY 2.0. In 2012 the museum received the entire 50,000-piece collection of the closed British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, instantly making it one of the most important holdings of colonial-era material in Britain. The collection arrived with its own ethical baggage. Some of those obje...

Image: Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK | CC BY 2.0