Whilst 10 years might not seem that long in the building’s nearly 200-year history, the journey to becoming a fully-fledged visitor attraction and museum hasn’t been plain sailing. It took many years of fundraising, tenacity, and determination from a dedicated group of volunteers who set up the Manchester Historic Buildings Trust, to get to where we are today. And let’s not forget the £2.6 million from The National Lottery Heritage Fund and others, without which the last 10 years would not have been possible.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s House, just off Oxford Road in Manchester, is not just the only museum dedicated to the writer Elizabeth Gaskell and her family, but the House itself, a Grade II* listed building, is a unique example of surviving Regency architecture in the city.

Best known for her novels, Mary Barton, North and South and Cranford, Elizabeth Gaskell is one of Manchester’s most influential writers. Reading her novels, you can recognise the thinly veiled northern cities and towns, the people, the cobbles, and the train journeys. She wrote about the north, giving us characters with flaws, grit, integrity, and humour. Most of all she immortalised working class Manchester, bringing to life the dialect, working conditions and the voices of women as well as men. She essentially did for Manchester what her publisher, Dickens, did for London, which as a northern Victorian woman seems even more remarkable.

Elizabeth was also a truly modern woman for her time, squeezing in time to write between the demands of her household. She had to balance negotiating deadlines and payment, writing short stories when her four daughters were young, travelling abroad without her husband, hosting visits from her friend Charlotte Brontë and upsetting a few people along the way! Her stories and letters are universal, her work read and adapted for TV and theatre across the world to this day. She was original, modern and above all authentic, a true Manchester woman who deserves to be celebrated.

The Gaskell family moved to the House on Plymouth Grove, in 1850, their third home in Manchester and where two of her daughters lived until 1913. After their deaths it was sold to the Harper family and then to the University of Manchester as home to the International Society between the 1960s to the mid-1990s.

Finally, in 2004, the Trust took ownership of the building, as well as its leaking roof, collapsed ceilings, damp cellar and a hundred other issues.

Elizabeth and William Gaskell lived in three houses in Manchester, and they were all located in the Oxford Road Corridor area as we now know it. The family rented houses on Upper Rumford Street, then Dover Street, and finally Plymouth Grove. Interestingly, when other middle-class families moved out of the Plymouth Grove area, the Gaskell family stayed to witness the area transformed around them. It wasn’t until both Elizabeth and William’s death that their two unmarried daughters bought the house on Plymouth Grove to live out the rest of their days.

The visitors to Plymouth Grove during Elizabeth’s lifetime are a ‘who’s-who’ of Victorian cultural society – Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Hallé, and William Thackeray to name a few. Even after Elizabeth’s death this seems to have continued as noted in her daughter Meta’s 1913 obituary in the Manchester Guardian, which said ‘Meta’s drawing-room remained the nearest possible approach to an absolute centre of the social life of educated Manchester…’
As a champion for education, for all, William Gaskell was a founder member of Owens College, one of the institutions that later merged to become the University of Manchester.

The two Gaskell daughters living at Plymouth Grove were founding subscribers of the Manchester College of Music (later the Royal Northern College of Music) and donated generously to the Whitworth Art Gallery and the Hallé Concerts Society. Meta Gaskell was one of the nine founders of Manchester High School for Girls, the school later attended by the Pankhurst daughters, and in efforts to preserve some green space for recreation within the city, Meta gave Manchester Corporation £500 towards a fund to secure land on Swinton Grove as a public park.

Little could they have imagined that their home is now visited by people from around the world.

Today, Elizabeth Gaskell’s House has developed into a dynamic, innovative visitor attraction and is now an accredited museum. Over the last 10 years the volunteer team have welcomed over 50,000 visitors through the doors on public open days, for school visits, private tours and weddings. Children in local primary schools now visit and learn about Elizabeth Gaskell in their history lessons – something which didn’t happen before 2014.

The House is now listed alongside the great writers Houses of the world in press articles and reaches global audiences of thousands annually with its online events. In 2019 the volunteer team received the Queen’s Award for Voluntary service, and the garden has several Britian in Bloom accolades to commend it. The Museum Accreditation has been a significant milestone for the house and will give it well deserved industry recognition and open doors to new opportunities in the future.
The majority of objects in the collection are from the 19th century, with some objects dating earlier, from the late Georgian period to the early Regency, on the basis that Victorian families would likely have ‘recycled’ furnishings from earlier periods, acquiring second-hand items or items inherited from family. Objects have been chosen either because they were period-appropriate for a late Regency/early Victorian suburban villa, to resemble furnishings described in Gaskell family records, such as in Elizabeth Gaskell’s surviving letters; or because they matched objects described in the records of the 1914 auction of the House’s contents.

The study and its collection of over 1500 books are a firm favourite amongst visitors and volunteers alike. The books have been chosen as they either match Gaskell family records of books the Gaskell family owned, were mentioned in Elizabeth’s books or letters, were books that the Gaskells borrowed from Manchester’s Portico Library or because they have an association with the Gaskell family. But the best thing by far is that visitors can handle and touch pretty much all of the books. It is a book lovers dream!

The story of Elizabeth Gaskell’s House from dereliction to delight is open now and runs into late 2025.

Find out more at elizabethgaskellhouse.co.uk