Stockport Museum In Vernon Park

Stockport Museum in Vernon Park is a municipal museum and art gallery designed by Mills in 1860, extended in 1866. The building is constructed of brick with stone dressings and a slate roof with a plain terracotta ridge.

The original building is a south-facing structure of five bays, two storeys with gabled ends and brick chimneys. The 1866 extension forms a cross-wing to the west, extending southwards with a hipped roof.

The exterior displays Italianate detailing. Most of the first floor is blind, except for paired sash windows with margin glazing in the gable ends; those to the extension are surrounded by stone architraves and linked by a continuous stone cill band. The blind first-floor sections are enlivened with brick panels and stone roundels. At the eaves runs a brick Lombardy frieze or corbel table, interrupted by central set-back sections where the eaves are supported by timber brackets. Below sits a brick dentilated band. The ground floor features round-arched sash windows with margin glazing. Window surrounds and sizes vary but present symmetrical elevations overall. Openings are generally separated by rusticated stone pilasters extending between thin stone storey bands. The principal entrance has a stone architrave with a keystone surmounted by a grotesque mask, forming part of a carved frieze between flanking pilasters and supporting a stone pediment. Above sits a simple stone plaque recording the gift of the building to Stockport. The south gable end of the extension has a simpler architraved entrance with an inscribed foundation stone above. Modern additions—a ground-floor café to the east gable end and a fire escape on the north side—are not of special interest.

The interior of the 1860 building contains two floors of public display galleries with moulded plastered beams to compartmentalised ceilings. The timber staircase rises against the front wall of the principal room and features cast-iron decorative balusters and a mahogany handrail. The ground floor of the wing is divided into small offices.

Vernon Park was opened to the public in 1858 using land granted to the corporation in 1844 by Lord Vernon. The museum opened on 22 October 1860 as a gift from Stockport's two Liberal MPs, James Kershaw and John Benjamin Smith, who each donated £500. Mills designed it with a ground-floor museum and first-floor art gallery. The building initially had few exhibits and no staff, but successful appeals for donations prompted the Corporation to add the new wing in 1866. This wing partially housed Stockport's first free public library until its relocation to Stockport's Market Hall in 1874. The architect 'Mr Mills' may have been Alexander Mills (1814–1905), a leading Manchester architect who practised in partnership with James Murgatroyd.

The museum building with its new wing appears complete on the 1875 1:2500 Ordnance Survey map. It exemplifies the Victorian municipal museum, funded by local dignitaries and donated to the corporation. It displays a showy architectural exterior but a typically more modest interior, designed so that decoration does not distract from exhibits. The blind first floor maximises hanging space for paintings, which are illuminated by diffuse light from roof windows.