Alan Warhurst, who has died aged 89, was one of a handful of new directors engaged from the 1960s onwards in transforming museums into the popular and socially engaged institutions they are today. The years immediately following the second world war were not kind to museums. Several had been blitzed; most suffered staff reductions and funding shortages through the late 1940s and 50s as local authorities struggled to rebuild services. But Alan, with colleagues largely from outside London, saw a way forward that was geared to family education.

An innovator, he maintained that museums should stretch their boundaries and engage local communities in wider activities such as fossil hunting and the exploration of ruins and archaeological excavation, as well as broaden their responsibilities to encompass “living history” in rural areas of historic importance. He believed in the importance of design to engage an inquisitive public of all ages and abilities, and campaigned against entry charges.

During his decade as director of Bristol City Museum from 1960, he accumulated much experience in the cause of a building that was not ultimately realised. He worked with the architect Sir Hugh Casson on researching a design that had the bombed-out shell of St Peter’s Church in its central courtyard, visiting the best museums in continental Europe and north America in the process. To work with him on this he built up a team of colleagues, including Mike Belcher, Neil Cossons and Max Hebditch, who went on to become significant museum figures themselves.

In 1970 he was appointed director of the Ulster Museum, in Belfast. Arriving just after the start of the Troubles, he saw it as a vital tool to bring diverse communities together through shared cultural activities. He oversaw the completion of a big extension, in brutalist style, which opened in 1972, but experienced the impact of violence both professionally and personally.

His family home suffered a car bomb explosion in 1974, and two years later a museum store on the city’s outskirts was bombed, leading to the destruction of its entire collection of costume and textiles. Undeterred, Alan rebuilt his house, and continued to transform the museum, whose exhibitions included one of Renaissance gold jewellery recovered from the galleass La Girona – a warship that used both oars and sails – which sank off the north Antrim coast in the storms of 1588, on its way back round Britain after the defeat of the Armada.

Manchester Museum, where Alan Warhurst led a programme of gallery redevelopment that brought it a Museum of the Year in award in 1987. Photograph: University of Manchester

His final post came as director of Manchester Museum (1977-93). Part of the University of Manchester, it was again an institution in need of modernisation. Alan trained staff and ensured that advanced forensic research was undertaken to understand the causes of death of mummified ancient Egyptians and of Lindow Man – the preserved body of a man discovered in a peat bog at Lindow Moss, near Wilmslow in Cheshire. He led a programme of gallery redevelopment, winning Museum of the Year in 1987 for the redisplay of the Egyptology and botany collections, and for expanding its size and scope. An article he wrote in 1985 about funding threats to university museums led to the formation the following year of the University Museums Group, with Alan as its first secretary.

Born and brought up in Bolton, Lancashire, Alan was the son of William Warhurst, an accountant at British Rail, and Margaret (nee Holden), who came from a farming family. He was head boy of Bolton Church Institute (later Canon Slade school), and in 1947 was commissioned into the Lancashire Fusiliers from the officers training school in Bangalore, serving in India and Egypt, an experience that confirmed him in his pacifist tendencies. Graduating in history as a Hulme Hall scholar from the University of Manchester in 1950, and passionate about archaeology, he was appointed assistant curator at the Grosvenor Museum in Chester. Following posts at Maidstone Museum & Art Gallery and Northampton Museum, Alan went to Bristol at the age of 33.

He preferred a consensual approach to management, although a colleague remembers at least one occasion after he and another colleague had failed to reach agreement over the plans for an exhibition, when Alan got up rather reluctantly from his desk and said: “I suppose we should now have a confrontation meeting.”

He served as president of the Museums Association (1975-76), chairman of the North West Area Museum Council (1992-97), on the Museums and Galleries Commission (1994-99), and as external examiner of the museum studies course at the University of Leicester. In 1990 he was appointed CBE.

He married Sheila Bradbury, a teacher and psychotherapist, in 1953. She survives him, along with their children, Alyson, Frances and Nicholas.

• Alan Warhurst, museum director, born 6 February 1927; died 4 December 2016