Qualla: National Science and Media Museum

National Science and Media Museum: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. There were five storeys of cinema screen in April 1983 when the IMAX projector first threw an image at the wall in Bradford - the largest screen in Britain at the time, the first permanent IMAX installation in the United Kingdom, and the centrepiece of the brand-new National Museum of Photography, Film and Television. Six-channel sound. A projection booth visible through a darkened glass panel on the fourth floor where the public could watch the projectionist threading celluloid the size of a small carpet. The museum opened in a converted theatre building in Bradford, an inheritance of the city's older entertainment economy. Forty years later the cinema is digital, the booth is gone, and the museum has changed names twice - it became the National Media Museum in 2006, then the National Science and Media Museum in 2017 - but the IMAX screen is still there, and the original idea behind it has only deepened.

Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

National Science and Media Museum: Why Bradford

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Linda Spashett, Storye book, CC BY 3.0. The Science Museum in London wanted a northern outpost in the early 1980s. Bradford wanted prestige, jobs, and a reason for visitors to make the trip from Leeds across the Aire Gap. The two ambitions met around the old Princes Theatre, a multi-storey playhouse whose bars and dres...

Image: Linda Spashett, Storye book | CC BY 3.0

National Science and Media Museum: Le Prince's Films

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Foto43, CC BY 2.0. The collection runs to 3.5 million objects, but two of them are short, two-second sequences of film shot in Leeds in October 1888. Roundhay Garden Scene shows the inventor Louis Le Prince's son, his daughter-in-law, his mother-in-law Sarah Whitley, and a friend walking in a small...

Image: Foto43 | CC BY 2.0

National Science and Media Museum: Wonderlab and Power Up

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chemical Engineer, CC BY-SA 4.0. The museum stopped pretending its 1980s name still fit when it became the National Science and Media Museum in 2017. Wonderlab opened the same year - an interactive gallery built around the physics of light and sound, with a 15-metre echo tube and a mirror maze and the world's fi...

Image: Chemical Engineer | CC BY-SA 4.0

National Science and Media Museum: Three Cinemas, Three Histories

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The wub, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Pictureville Cinema opened in 1992, and the film producer David Puttnam once called it the best cinema in the world. It still screens 70 mm prints, original 3-strip 35 mm Cinerama, silent films with live accompaniment, and modern digital releases. It is one of only three publ...

Image: The wub | CC BY-SA 4.0

National Science and Media Museum: What's Kept, What's Moved

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chemical Engineer, CC BY-SA 4.0. The decision to transfer most of the Royal Photographic Society collection to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2016 was controversial, and the museum's pull-back from the Bradford International Film Festival the same period upset many in the city. The argument was that...

Image: Chemical Engineer | CC BY-SA 4.0