International Slavery Museum has been awarded £200,000 from the Wolfson Foundation to support the museum’s major transformation plans in 2026 and beyond. The funding will go towards the museum’s symbolic new entrance, a powerful statement on Liverpool’s historic waterfront that will announce International Slavery Museum to the world.
Opened in 2007 on the third floor of the Maritime Museum, International Slavery Museum has never had its own front door. A new Entrance Pavilion, designed by Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, and due to begin construction early next year, represents a defining moment for the museum.
Laura Pye, Director, National Museums Liverpool, said: “We’re thrilled to be putting this generous award from the Wolfson Foundation towards International Slavery Museum’s new Entrance Pavilion. As an emotive focal point of the new museum, it symbolises not only the struggles and resistance of the enslaved people whose stories we tell in the museum, but also decades of work from the local communities who have championed the development and raised the profile of the museum from a basement gallery to now, the only museum in the world dedicated to transatlantic slavery and its legacies. We are delighted to be partnering with the Wolfson Foundation at this landmark moment.”
Paul Ramsbottom, Chief Executive of the Wolfson Foundation, said: “There could be no more important task for a museum than to articulate the history and legacy of slavery in a clear and compassionate way. We are pleased to support the transformation of the International Slavery Museum, appropriately located on Liverpool’s waterfront. The transformed museum will allow visitors to engage with these vital issues – and to connect local histories to global stories that continue to shape our world.”