The Atkinson

The Atkinson stands on Lord Street, the Victorian shopping boulevard of the seaside town of Southport, and it puts a theatre, a library, galleries and a museum under one roof. It carries the name of William Atkinson, a cotton manufacturer from Knaresborough in Yorkshire and a regular visitor to the town, whose gift paid for the art gallery and library that opened in the late 1870s.

The building closed in 2010 for a refurbishment costing about £20 million and reopened in 2013. Its fine art collection holds close to 3,000 works from the 17th century to the present, and in 2014 a new gallery brought out the Goodison Egyptology collection, which had been out of public view for about 40 years.

The picture many visitors come for is Lilith, painted in 1887 by John Collier, an English painter who worked in the Pre-Raphaelite manner. It shows the figure from Jewish legend with a serpent coiled around her body, and it reached Southport in the 1970s from the art gallery in nearby Bootle.