This exciting new gallery celebrates Britain's Merchant Navy and examines the role of merchant ships and seafarers over the last 200 years. The displays cover 500 years of transatlantic slavery and its consequences from 1500 to the present, focusing on the 18th and 19th centuries.
History comes alive in the dim, cramped bowels of the reconstructed hull of an emigrant packet ship.
Both are best remembered for their tragic sinkings, but in their heyday they were floating palaces, the ultimate in Edwardian transatlantic travel. An important collection of ship portraits, including work by the internationally famous Liverpool 'port painters' of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The gallery also shows paintings of Liverpool ships trading in the Far East by Chinese artists. Temporary notice Ceramics from the Art and the Sea gallery have been temporarily withdrawn from public view. The Piermaster's House and Offices are the last of their kind in Liverpool.