Explorer Liverpool

The Western Approaches Museum occupies the Second World War bunker beneath the Exchange Flags offices, from which Western Approaches Command directed the Atlantic convoys and the fight against U-boats. Visitors see the restored operations room, the cypher room and a 1940s street scene. It opened in 1993 and has been run by Big Heritage since 2017.

The British Music Experience is a museum of British popular music in the Cunard Building on Liverpool's Pier Head. It began in 2009 as an exhibition at The O2 in London and moved to Liverpool after that venue closed in 2014. Instruments, stage outfits and memorabilia trace the story from 1945 onwards, alongside interactive displays.

The Museum of Liverpool tells the history of the city and its people in a purpose-built building on Mann Island at the Pier Head, designed by the Danish practice 3XN and opened in 2011. Its galleries cover the port, migration, sport and music, and among more than 6,000 objects they show the 1838 steam locomotive Lion.

World Museum is Liverpool's museum of archaeology, world cultures and natural science, begun in 1851 with the Earl of Derby's natural history collection and housed on William Brown Street since 1860. It holds about 15,000 objects from ancient Egypt and Sudan and has a Bug House with live insects and a planetarium opened in 1970.

The Walker Art Gallery is Liverpool's main public art gallery, a neoclassical building on William Brown Street opened in 1877 and named after the brewer and mayor Sir Andrew Barclay Walker. Its collection runs from early Italian and Netherlandish paintings to Rembrandt and Degas, with a large group of Pre-Raphaelite works and 20th-century British art.

The Beatles Story is a museum about the Beatles in the Britannia Vaults of the Royal Albert Dock, opened in 1990. Its walk-through displays recreate places from the band's career, among them the Casbah Coffee Club, the Cavern Club and Abbey Road Studios, and show items such as John Lennon's glasses and George Harrison's first guitar.