Qualla: Great North Museum: Hancock

Great North Museum: Hancock: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chemical Engineer, CC0. Sparkie was a budgie from Newcastle who learned to recite poetry. He died in 1962. The museum stuffed him. He's still on display today. So is Bakt-en-Hor, an Egyptian mummy with another mummy named Irtyru for company in the next case. So is a life-size cast of an African elephant, made from a real stuffed elephant in a Bonn museum and craned through the wall during construction. So is a full-size T. rex skeleton replica shipped from Canada by Research Casting International, and a wombat that arrived in Europe in the late 18th century as the first complete specimen of its kind to make the journey. The Great North Museum: Hancock holds 240 years of collecting in one Victorian building expanded by Terry Farrell at a cost of £26 million.

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Image: Chemical Engineer | CC0

Great North Museum: Hancock: Tunstall's Wombat

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chemical Engineer, CC0. The collection that became the Hancock Museum can be traced to roughly 1780, when Marmaduke Tunstall began accumulating ethnographic and natural-history specimens in London, then moved them to North Yorkshire. He died in 1790. George Allan of Darlington bought the collection. In ...

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Image: Chemical Engineer | CC0

Great North Museum: Hancock: Armstrong's Eleven Thousand

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TubularWorld, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Society's first museum opened on Westgate Road in 1834, but the collection quickly outgrew it. In 1884 the current building opened on its present site, with a £11,500 donation - an enormous sum then - from William Armstrong, the Tyneside industrialist whose firm built much of...

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Image: TubularWorld | CC BY-SA 3.0

Great North Museum: Hancock: Hadrian on the Wall, Hadrian in the Case

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TubularWorld, CC BY-SA 3.0. Newcastle sits at the eastern terminus of Hadrian's Wall, the 73-mile frontier the Roman Emperor Hadrian ordered built in the 120s AD to mark the northern edge of the empire. The Hancock's Hadrian's Wall gallery is the closest comprehensive interpretation of the wall to its actua...

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Image: TubularWorld | CC BY-SA 3.0

Great North Museum: Hancock: Bio-Wall and Bison Bull

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chabe01, CC BY-SA 4.0. The reopened museum included an interactive Bio-Wall with hundreds of creatures shown surviving in extreme habitats from the Arctic to deserts, a great white shark display, polar bears and giraffes from the historic Hancock collections, and a moa skeleton. Between May and October...

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Image: Chabe01 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Great North Museum: Hancock: Six Hundred Thousand Visitors

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TubularWorld, CC BY-SA 3.0. The reopening on 23 May 2009 - the formal one came later, on 6 November, when Queen Elizabeth II cut the ribbon - blew past the annual target of 300,000 visitors. By August, four months in, more than 400,000 people had been through the doors. By the end of 2009 the figure exceede...

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Image: TubularWorld | CC BY-SA 3.0