Sitting at the centre of Bradford in West Yorkshire, the National Science and Media Museum spreads across seven floors and draws visitors from across the north of England and beyond. The building’s glass-fronted atrium, added during a £16 million refurbishment in 1998, gives the museum a striking street presence and houses a café and shop at ground level. Admission to the galleries is free, and the museum opens daily from 10 am to 6 pm, making it one of the more accessible large attractions in the region.
Galleries and Exhibitions
Six permanent galleries cover photography, television history, animation, video gaming, the internet, and the science of light and sound. The Kodak Gallery traces popular photography from the earliest known photographs to modern digital images, drawing on a collection of 35,000 objects and images donated by Kodak. Wonderlab, which opened in 2016 in place of the former Experience TV gallery, uses interactive exhibits and live experiments to explain light and sound. Power Up puts playable classic games in front of visitors in their original arcade and console formats, covering the full history of video gaming. The newest addition, Sound and Vision, opened in 2025 after the museum temporarily closed in July 2023 to allow two new galleries to be built; it reopened to visitors on 16 January 2025. Behind the public galleries, the museum’s research facility holds a collection of 3.5 million pieces.
Cinemas and Festivals
The museum contains three cinema screens, the most notable being Europe’s first permanent IMAX installation, which opened in April 1983 as part of the Bradford Film Festival. A second IMAX screen opened in the UK fifteen years later. Over the years the museum has hosted the Bradford International Film Festival, which ran until 2014, alongside festivals dedicated to widescreen film, video games, and science. In September 2011 the public voted it the best indoor attraction in Yorkshire. The museum’s history includes a series of name changes: it opened in 1983 as the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, became the National Media Museum in 2006, and took its current name in March 2017 following a rebrand by the Science Museum Group, which in March 2016 had announced a £7.5 million five-year investment plan for the site.