Manx National Heritage welcomes back visitors

Manx National Heritage, the charity responsible for the care and promotion of the Isle of Man’s natural and cultural heritage, has confirmed plans for a phased re-opening of the Manx Museum and House of Manannan following the recent completion of the circuit-breaker lockdown. 

The House of Manannan will be the first MNH site to partially re-open, with the shop, café and temporary exhibition gallery opening at 10am today, Tuesday 2 February, followed by the full re-opening of both the Manx Museum and the House of Manannan on Saturday 13 February, the start of the Half Term break.

The galleries have been temporarily closed since early January, when then Isle of Man entered a ‘circuit-breaker lockdown’, to help contain the spread of COVID-19. 

Edmund Southworth, Director of Manx National Heritage said:

“We are very grateful to the Manx public, key workers and our staff team for responding so positively to recent restrictions, helping our Island recover and quickly return to a relatively normal way of life. 

Some of our staff team were redeployed to support the medical services and wider community during lockdown and a side-effect of this is that it will take a little longer to get our staff fully back in place and the sites ready to re-open.” 

To allow time for staff to return from redeployment, undertake deep cleaning of the sites, annual maintenance of exhibits, annual stock takes, library and archive annual inventory of collections (normally undertaken in the last week of January) and to enable the completion of essential staff training, both the Manx Museum and House of Manannan will only be fully open to the public from Saturday 13 February.  The Manx Museum, Library will also re-open on Saturday 13 February.  More details are available on www.manxnationalheritage.im

ENDS

Image caption:  Manx Museum Viking demonstrates how to wear PPE mask

For further information, please contact:

Lynsey Clague

Communications Manager, Manx National Heritage

E-mail: lynsey.clague@mnh.im

Tel: 01624 648032

Manx Museum Viking demonstrates how to wear PPE mask