The cultural history of museums is crucial to the understanding of nineteenth-century natural history and its place in wider society, and yet although many of the larger metropolitan institutions are well charted, there remains very little accessible work on the hundreds of English collections outside London and the ancient universities. Natural history museums have been studied as part of the imperial project and as instruments of national governments; this paper presents an intermediary level of control, examining the various individuals and institutions who owned and managed museums at a local level in provincial England, and their intended audience constituencies. The shifting forms and functions of collections in Newcastle, Sheffield and Manchester are studied in the hands of private collectors, learned societies, municipal authorities and civic colleges. I argue that the civic elite retained control of museums throughout the nineteenth century, and although the admission criteria of these various groups became ostensibly more inclusive, privileged access continued to be granted to expert and esteemed visitors.