Abigail Willis’ blog about museums and galleries
The painter Jean Cooke (1927-2008) was well ahead of the current trend for wild gardening when she listed ‘ungardening’ among her hobbies in Who’s Who. A new exhibition at The Garden Museum reveals how the artist – overshadowed for many years by her coercive husband and fellow painter John Bratby – found both inspiration and…
Will the simple pleasures of gallery going, museum meandering and garden gandering be all the sweeter after months of lockdown? It seems highly likely, and with pre-booked time slots and carefully restricted visitor numbers, the experience of seeing an exhibition in the ‘new normal’ might arguably be even better with more space and time to…
The little wooden train that trundles over the Tramuntana mountains between Palma and Soller in Mallorca is one tourist excursion that is worth its ticket price. Now electrified, this narrow gauge railway line opened in 1912, and is no mean feat of engineering. The one hour journey takes passengers up 199 metres with an incline…
Snowy leads the way
Huzzah! The latest, fully revised edition of Museums & Galleries of London is coming soon – the publication date is 18th May.
This award-winning museum celebrates William Morris, the founding father of the Arts and Crafts Movement. A powerhouse of energy and creativity, Morris was also an entrepreneur, poet, translator, Socialist, typographer, and pioneering conservationist. No wonder the cause of his death (in 1896) was given as ‘being William Morris and having done more work than most…
It took father-and-son team Marc and Isambard Brunel eighteen years to build the world’s first under-river tunnel, linking Rotherhithe on the south side of the Thames to Wapping on the north. Located in the original Engine House, this award-winning museum tells the story of their achievement in the face of floods, financial losses and human…
Medical man Dr Henry Stephens was the inventor of the famous ‘Blue-Black Writing Fluid’ and went on to become something big in ink. His son Henry Charles (‘Inky’) Stephens developed the family business and brought Avenue House in 1874, adding a laboratory and planting the rare trees which can be seen in the landscaped grounds…
This imposing Modernist house was the studio-home of Russian sculptress Dora Gordine and her husband, the diplomat turned collector, the Honourable Richard Hare. Designed by the couple in 1936, the house and its collections were bequeathed to Kingston University on Nadine’s death in 1991, and a major restoration programme was undertaken to bring the…
I love it when museums and gardens collide, so it was a real pleasure to visit Strawberry Hill, Horace Walpole’s ‘little Gothic castle’, for the first time the other weekend. Both house and garden (one of the first ‘naturalistic’ English gardens) have been on the receiving end of some serious restoration of late, and some…