At Home with the Pankhurst Family at The Pankhurst Centre

At Home with the Pankhurst Family marks the reopening of The Pankhurst Centre, the Grade II* listed former home of Emmeline Pankhurst, with community groups invited to enjoy the experience, prior to the public opening on Sunday 29 August.

The exhibition enables visitors to get to know the people behind the iconic Pankhurst name; their lives, influences, tragedies, resourcefulness and the factors that turned them into the campaigners that they became.  This includes how they used their skills, notably Sylvia as an artist, and how their campaigning meant that their own aspirations were sometimes left unfulfilled, Adela’s career dreams of being a teacher put to one side to join her mother and sisters in their work to achieve the enfranchisement of women. It also includes looking at the influences from both within the family and the radical city of Manchester in which they lived.

Home with the Pankhurst Family is a significant milestone for this small museum, which is the country’s only museum dedicated to female suffrage and exploring what the legacy of this means; past, present and future.  That it has been made possible is thanks to funding from AIM Biffa Award History Makers, as part of the Landfill Communities Fund.

The Pankhurst Centre museum occupies the ground floor of 62 Nelson Street, with the room layouts very much intact and the story flowing from the entrance hallway, where visitors are reminded of the campaigners who saved the building from destruction in the 1970s, to the parlour where Emmeline Pankhurst held the first meeting of what would become known as the suffragettes.

We are delighted that The Pankhurst Centre is open again and joins a number of Manchester’s most significant museums and galleries found here on the Oxford Road Corridor. If you are visiting The Pankhurst, make a day of it and add Elizabeth Gaskell’s House, the Whitworth and Victoria Baths to your itinerary.