Merseyside Maritime Museum

Merseyside Maritime Museum occupies warehouse and dock-office buildings on Royal Albert Dock in Liverpool, England, and is part of National Museums Liverpool. It tells the story of the port from its Georgian and Victorian peak through the age of the great ocean liners to the present, in a setting that is itself a Grade I listed relic of the 1840s dock system. The collections cover shipbuilding, navigation, emigration, dock labour, Customs work and the Merseyside shipping lines. The museum is best known for its galleries on the Titanic, whose owners the White Star Line were registered and managed from Liverpool, and on the Lusitania, the Cunard liner torpedoed in 1915, with personal items, models and survivor accounts. Titanic and Liverpool and Lusitania: Life, Loss, Legacy are the principal permanent exhibitions. Other displays include the Seized! gallery about the work of HM Customs and Excise, the Battle of the Atlantic gallery, the Emigrants to a New World display and a collection of ship models. A working dock area outside has historic vessels moored, and the Piermaster's House has been restored to show an Edwardian interior. The museum presents the material through thematic galleries with objects, film, oral testimony and reconstructions, and it was extended and modernised in recent decades to improve interpretation. Its building on the north side of the dock retains the original brick and cast-iron structure, and the galleries are reached through a shared entrance with the International Slavery Museum on the upper floor. Admission is free. Most visitors spend between two and three hours, and the museum is easy to combine with the rest of Albert Dock.