Qualla: Leicester Museum & Art Gallery

Leicester Museum & Art Gallery: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Dawkeye at English Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 2.5. In 1956, a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl named Tina Negus found a strange leaf-shaped impression in the rocks of Charnwood Forest. No one took her seriously. A year later, a fifteen-year-old boy named Roger Mason found the same fossil in the same forest, and the scientific world paid attention. The leaf was Charnia masoni, the first fossil ever found in Precambrian rock, a discovery that pushed back the known history of complex life on Earth by tens of millions of years. The original specimen, the holotype itself, lives a few miles away inside a red-brick museum on Leicester's New Walk. The display there now credits both Tina and Roger by name, an acknowledgment a long time coming.

Image: The original uploader was Dawkeye at English Wikipedia. | CC BY-SA 2.5

Leicester Museum & Art Gallery: A Hansom Cab Maker's Building

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alfred Woolmer, Public domain. The museum opened in 1849 in a building designed by Joseph Hansom, the same Joseph Hansom whose name still travels through cities on the back of every hansom cab. He drew his ground plan with neoclassical columns and tall windows, the architecture of Victorian self-improvement, w...

Image: Alfred Woolmer | Public domain

Leicester Museum & Art Gallery: George the Sauropod and the Barrow Kipper

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Poliphilo, CC0. Two long-dead reptiles dominate the dinosaur gallery. George, more formally Cetiosaurus oxoniensis, is fifteen metres of Middle Jurassic sauropod hauled out of the Williamson Cliffe quarry in Rutland in June 1968. The skeleton is among the most complete sauropods anywhere in the ...

Image: Poliphilo | CC0

Leicester Museum & Art Gallery: Four Mummies and a Statue from a Bankruptcy

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit anonymous, Public domain. The Egyptology gallery holds four mummified people, named Pa-nesit-tawy, Pe-iuy, Bes-en-Mut, and Ta-Bes. They were once living individuals in the Nile valley, whose bodies were brought to England during the Victorian fashion for Egyptian antiquities. Pe-iuy was the first to arriv...

Image: anonymous | Public domain

Leicester Museum & Art Gallery: Pictures Smuggled from Berlin

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ashley Dace, CC BY-SA 2.0. Leicester holds the largest collection of German Expressionist art in the United Kingdom. The works arrived in the 1930s through a single family. Alfred Hess was a Jewish industrialist and collector in Erfurt; his son Hans Hess worked as assistant curator at the New Walk Museum. ...

Image: Ashley Dace | CC BY-SA 2.0