Museums to Visit in Birmingham: What Is Open, and What to See in Each

Birmingham's museums make the strongest single case for a visit to the city, and the position has improved recently. The Museum & Art Gallery has reopened after a long closure for building work, which restores the free half-day that had been missing from the middle of the city for some considerable time.

Four collections cover most of what a visitor would want, and among the sixteen places worth your time they are genuinely different from one another. One is free, one is built for children, one preserves a working room untouched, and one is a court of small houses shown only by timed guided tour.

On Chamberlain Square, and free to enter. It has come back in stages, not at once, and the spaces currently in use include the Pre-Raphaelite galleries, the Staffordshire Hoard gallery, the Birmingham History galleries, the Round Room, the Industrial Gallery, the Bridge Gallery and a new gallery aimed squarely at families.

Because the reopening is phased, which galleries are available genuinely changes, and further funding has been secured to bring more of them back. That makes this the one museum in the city where checking before travelling is worth the moment that it takes, rather than merely being a prudent habit. Which rooms are open on a given week is listed by the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery itself.

At Millennium Point in Digbeth, about fourteen minutes on foot from New Street and closer to Moor Street.

Four floors of science galleries, a planetarium and an outdoor science garden, built around Birmingham's industrial collection including a Spitfire built at Castle Bromwich along with working steam engines from the city.

It is the clearest choice in the city for children, because it is organised around handling and doing and not reading and looking.

That also makes it the loudest of the four, which is worth knowing if a quiet hour spent among pictures was what you had in mind for the afternoon.

In Hockley, roughly twenty-two minutes on foot from the station or a short tram ride. A jewellery workshop preserved exactly as its owners left it when the business closed in 1981, with the benches, the tools and half-finished work still lying exactly where somebody put it down at the time.

What makes it unusual is that almost nothing here was arranged for display.

Most museums assemble a room; this one simply stopped being used and was kept, which gives it a quality of interruption that a curated reconstruction of the very same trade could never quite manage to produce at all.

On Hurst Street in Southside, nine minutes from New Street and beside the Hippodrome. It is the city's last surviving court of back-to-back houses, shown by timed guided tour through four homes each furnished for a different decade of its occupation, which requires booking ahead in place of simply turning up on the day.

The tour format is not a marketing choice. The houses are small and deliberately unaltered, which is also why access here is limited in a way the other three are not: making the site step-free would destroy precisely the very thing that visitors are actually coming all that way to see.