The gallery will be closed from Monday, November 3 for a “refresh”
Head of World Museum Ashley Cooke (National Museums Liverpool)(Image: National Museums Liverpool)
A much-loved gallery at the World Museum will close its doors ahead of a “refresh”. The Dinosaur and Natural World gallery at World Museum Liverpool, which houses the museum’s dinosaur, animal and habitats displays, will be closed from Monday, November 3. The gallery is scheduled to reopen in February 2026 as ‘Wild World’.
Ahead of the gallery’s closure, Head of World Museum Liverpool Ashley Cooke told the ECHO: “It’s one of the most loved and visited galleries in the museum and year-upon-year the gallery has continued to welcome and delight young visitors. It’s been loved by many generations of local people who remember visiting it in their childhoods. You wander around the gallery and you can see grandparents talking to their grandchildren about how they remember it at their age. It’s really special.
“But it’s 60-years-old now, part of it dates to 1964, so it is one of our oldest galleries in National Museums Liverpool and the oldest in World Museum. The last time it had a refresh was 2004, and we did a little bit of work around 2020 but it’s just really showing its age now. The gallery falls short of display and infrastructure standards that we expect of a national museum.”
The museum welcomes 700,000 visitors annually and Ashley states that the decision to make changes to the much-loved gallery is based on “recent feedback coming through, particularly in the last year”.
World Museum (Image: Liverpool Echo)
He added: “We have had people mentioning that the displays have been there for a long time. One visitor said quite frankly it’s rather boring, she remembers that part of the museum being really special but parts of it look very tired. A frequent one we’ve been getting as well, through our own visitor feedback and on socials, is that part of the museum should be in a museum of its own; it’s that old.
“So we decided it’s a core part of the museum visit so it’s time to invest in this gallery, and particularly the family audience.
“It’s really sad to be getting this feedback, but visibly as well ourselves we knew we needed to do some work there. We’re using this as a key opportunity to embrace and invest in the family demographic.”
Interior view of the 4th floor of World Museum Liverpool, showcasing exhibits on endangered species(Image: National Museums Liverpool)
The museum will make “refresh” the gallery, which is set to in February 2026 as ‘Wild World’. Ashley said: “I’m very glad for this opportunity. What we’ve got to remember is that it is a refresh and not a major rebuild. It will still look very familiar. But a lot of it is very outdated. It’s also the maintenance of the collection. The curators are thrilled actually, because it’s not just a refreshed offer for the visitors but a chance to maintain the collections to a higher standard.
“So, we will be investing in new showcases, not only better presentation for visitors but the protection of the collections. They really vary in that gallery, from taxidermy to the beloved zebra and lion, to fossilised dinosaur bones. We’ve even got fossilised dinosaur droppings which is a real highlight for visitors of all ages. So it’s about the protection of the collections really. So we’re really thrilled to have this opportunity.”
The museum has once again teamed up with Draw & Code, an award-winning design studio in Liverpool, to create immersive technologies and “a virtual reality dinosaur world” for ‘Wild World’. The company previously worked with the museum on the record breaking ‘China’s First Emperor and the Terracotta Warriors’ exhibition in 2018.
China’s First Emperor and the Terracotta Warriors Exhibition at World Museum, Liverpool
Studio MUTT, a Liverpool-based architecture and design firm, has been working with the museum to reimagine how visitors can experience of nature, connections across time, and cover millions of years of history.
Ashley said: “We want to captivate and inspire young audiences for years to come. For some people, the museum is their connection with nature and animals. We want to foster this love for nature and for the world in the museum. In terms of what is driving us, the objective, it’s about extinction, evolution, environment and how things have changed.
“Even Liverpool itself hasn’t always been this geographical spot on the globe, we’ve been further south, near the equator, under water for millions of years as well. We are trying to get people’s heads around that, how we’ve moved and broken a part.
“We’re taking people all the way back to the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.”
The lion and zebra will remain part of the museum’s Savannah diorama, but the museum will “readdress some of the problems with that display” and a lioness will also be added into the gallery. Ashley added: “There’s going to be a lot more messaging in that space, but still the very familiar diorama of the poor zebra getting hunted by a lion.
A diorama depicting a lion and a zebra in a savanna environment is displayed on the fourth floor of World Museum Liverpool(Image: Pete Carr for National Museums Liverpool)
“We will get to work with those items. They’re taxidermy, they’re vulnerable. So we have a collection care team that are specialists in working with museum collection items to ensure that they’re around for generations to come. That’s a big part of this refresh, it is about maintenance. There are parts of the gallery that were designed in the seventies that we just can’t access – that’s the tropical rainforest.
“So we are removing that structure so we can access the collection items, take them off display and put them through a process, the best way of describing it is a very careful dry cleaning process, but it’s what we call museum conservation. We will bring out new items that have not had visitors see them, in some instances have never been on display.”
Although Ashley Cooke is Head of World Museum, he is also an egyptologist, curating the museum’s extensive Egyptian antiquities collection, and helped refresh the Egypt gallery in 2017. He said: “Expect similar things, so more contemporary colours, much more focus on a family audience but also the academic integrity of the collection.
“We’re a national museum and the only group of national museums outside of London. We have really internationally important collections. So expect something much more of an experience, but something you can learn from.”
More information can be found on the National Museums Liverpool website.