The new Schaudepot (Show depot) is a walk-in museum warehouse in the spectacular industrial setting of the former salt factory on the Zollverein UNESCO World Heritage Site. There, the Ruhr Museum displays around 25,000 otherwise hidden treasures from its archaeological, natural science and historical collections. During a guided tour, you will wander through more than 110 years of collection history, get to know key objects and take a look behind the scenes of a regional museum.

Since the depot does not display classic exhibitions on a specific theme, it has a very different dynamic than a museum. It serves as a comprehensive repository for future exhibition projects on the history of the region and impressively illustrates the substance, size and diversity of the three collections as well as the three main tasks of a museum: collecting, preserving and researching.

Like the Ruhr Museum's permanent exhibition, you walk through the building from top to bottom. The passage of time across the levels of nature, culture and history begins chronologically with the oldest collection items of geology and leads via archaeology and holdings of the Middle Ages and early modern times to the area of industrial and contemporary history of the last 200 years.