The story
Bristol's grand Edwardian museum, opened in 1905 in an ornate Baroque-revival building paid for by the tobacco magnate William Henry Wills, holds everything a Victorian city wanted under one roof, dinosaurs and Egyptian mummies, ceramics and old master paintings.
Its art rooms range from Renaissance Italy to French Impressionism and the local Bristol School of landscape painters. The moment most people remember came in 2009, when the Bristol-born street artist Banksy took over the whole building for a summer show called Banksy versus Bristol Museum, slipping his own subversive pieces in among the taxidermy and the oils and drawing enormous queues.
The mix is the character of the place. You can walk from a gallery of ancient sculpture to a case of Bristol blue glass, the deep-blue local glassware the city was once famous for, in a few minutes.
