Historic House Museums

There are many wonderful museums around the UK and Ireland based in and around houses. Many of these lovely museums celebrate a particular person or a social issue and we have listed a small number of examples below the main article. There are also museums and visitor attractions made up of complete towns or suburbs, very often the work of a singular visionary individual. Again, there is a selection of these listed below the main article.

However, the main focus on this page is on house museums whose emphasis is the design and presentation of a particular style and ones that celebrate a particular period in architectural history. Often called ‘memory museums’, these are historic house museums that contain a collection of the traces of memory of the people who once lived there.

House Museums[edit]

Llwyn Celyn, a Grade 1 listed medieval 3 bay hall. Built in 1420, Llwyn Celyn was once part of the Llanthony Priory estate in the Black Mountains, Monmouthshire.
The late 15th century timber-framed Tudor House & Garden is Southampton’s most important historic building.
Ordsall Hall, Salford is a formerly moated Tudor mansion, the oldest parts of which were built during the 15th century - http://www.salfordcommunityleisure.co.uk/culture/ordsall-hall
Selly Manor is made up of two Tudor buildings saved by the Cadbury family and relocated to the Bournville estate, near Birmingham. https://sellymanormuseum.org.uk/
The Tudor House, Worcester formed from three mid-16th century houses, the foundations of which were laid as early as the 13th century.
The Red Lodge, Bristol, England - an imposing merchants house from the 1580s with original ceilings and carved panelling. https://www.bristolmuseums.org.uk/red-lodge-museum/
Dennis Severs House, London is an intimate portrait of the lives of a family of Huguenot silk-weavers from 1724 to the dawn of the 20th Century- http://www.dennissevershouse.co.uk/
An elegant Georgian Terrace built in 1719. It was the home of the Ogiers, a Hugenot weaving family before housing a fascinating array of immigrant families through the ages https://www.19princeletstreet.org.uk/about.html
Number 29, Dublin is a Georgian terraced House run by the National Museum of Ireland as a museum of Dublin home life for the period 1790 to 1820. http://www.numbertwentynine.ie
Pickford House, Derby - the family home of Georgian architect Joseph Pickford illustrating aspects of domestic life from the 18th to the 20th centuries http://www.derbymuseums.org/pickfords-house/
The Georgian House, Bristol built in 1790 for John Pinney, slave plantation owner and sugar merchant. It was also where the enslaved man of African descent, Pero Jones lived. ‪http://bit.ly/2CsUUrg‬
Number 1 Royal Crescent, Bath was the first of the Royal Crescent Houses to be built and is a museum to ‘fashionable English 18C living’. https://no1royalcrescent.org.uk
The Regency Town House, Brighton is a Grade I listed terraced house from the mid-1820s. It celebrates the architecture and social history of Brighton & Hove between 1780 and 1850. http://www.rth.co.uk
18 Stafford Terrace was the home of Punch cartoonist Edward Linley Sambourne. It provides a rare example of what was known as an 'Aesthetic interior' or 'House Beautiful' style. http://www.rbkc.gov.uk/subsites/museums/18staffordterrace1.aspx
Leighton House is the former home of the Victorian artist Frederic, Lord Leighton. The only purpose-built studio-house open to the public in the United Kingdom, it is one of the most remarkable buildings of the nineteenth century, http://www.rbkc.gov.uk/subsites/museums/leightonhousemuseum1.aspx
‪ ‘Mr Straw’s House’ Blythe Grove, Worksop - a perfectly preserved 1920’s semi-detached owned by a local grocer’s family. Treasured possessions and ordinary domestic items exactly where their owners left them. #HouseMuseums ‬http://bit.ly/2qSdPm1‬
The Locksmith's House at the Black Country Living Museum recreates the home of the Hodson family of lock makers from a century ago [1]
Sudley House, Liverpool - a Victorian corn merchant's house from the early 19C with period features & furniture, and its the merchant’s art collection still hung in its original location. bit.ly/2EsCjtF
Emery Walker’s House, Hammersmith - a Georgian terraced house with a perfectly restored Arts & Crafts Interior and extensive display of photos, documents, furniture and art works relating to Emery Walker and William Morris. http://www.emerywalker.org.uk/house
The Back To Back House Museum, Birmingham. The last servicing examples of a very particular, and ultimately discredited, form of British terraced housing built from the 18th to 19th century.
The Tenement House Museum, Glasgow. An authentic time capsule of life in an early 20th-century Glasgow tenement. https://www.nts.org.uk/visit/places/the-tenement-house
'Red House' in Bexleyheath, SE London is a significant Arts & Crafts home designed for William Morris by his friend Philip Webb in 1859
House for an Art Lover - a recent recreation of a previously unbuilt competition entry by Charles Rennie Macintosh http://bit.ly/2C5iI1b
78 Derngate - a Grade II* Georgian house in the Cultural Quarter of Northampton, remodelled by Charles Rennie Mackintosh in 1916.https://www.78derngate.org.uk/
2 Willow Road, Hampstead, London - the only Modernist house in London that's open to the public and the former home of Trellick Tower architect Erno Goldfinger.
The Prefab Museum, Catford, East London celebrating the prefabricated homes built during WWII

Historic Towns & Villages[edit]

Trowse, Norfolk. An existing village was expanded by the Colman family during the 1800s for workers at Colman's mustard factory.
Saltaire Victorian utopian workers village built by entrepreneur Sir Titus Salt in the 1850s http://www.saltairevillage.info/
Bournville Model Workers Village, Birmingham - built by George and John Cadbury to house and improve the lives of workers at their chocolate factory.
Port Sunlight on the Wirral, Merseyside. Built from 1888 by Lever Brothers to accommodate workers in its soap factory (now part of Unilever).
Tyneham, a ghost village near Lulworth Coven in Dorset. The Whole village was requisitioned in 1943 for use as an army firing range but is open for visitors.
Bata Houses on the Bata Estate, East Tilsbury build by Czech shoe entrepreneur Tomáš Bata in the 1930s.
Silver End, Braintree, Essex. Built for their workers by the Crittall Windows company.

Open Air Museums & 'Reconstructed' Towns[edit]

Weald & Downland Museum, West Sussex has rescued and restored representative examples of vernacular buildings from the South East of England http://www.wealddown.co.uk/
Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire. A collection of restored, historic buildings from the industrial past of the West Midlands.
Little Woodham Living History Museum near Gosport, Hampshire a recreated 17th century village.
Beamish Museum, a living, working museum that tells the story of everyday life in the North East of England http://www.beamish.org.uk/
The Black Country Living Museum, Dudley tells the story of one of the very first industrialised landscapes in Britain.
Chiltern Open Air Museum was founded in 1976 with the aim of rescuing threatened buildings from the local area. It now houses more than thirty historic buildings of all ages spanning 2000 years of Chilterns history. https://www.coam.org.uk/
Morewell Quay, Devon. Once a thriving port and copper ore mine, now a living museum with the village buildings restored to tell a unique story of Devon industry. https://www.morwellham-quay.co.uk/
Blist Hill, Ironbridge. A recreated Victorian Town, containing houses, shops and workshops, that is part of the wider Ironbridge Gorge Museums network.

Historic Houses Commemorating People[edit]

At Chimni we are mainly focussed on house history, architecture and building styles, so our focus in this section is on house museums that celebrate and explain different periods of house building. However, dotted around the country are a series of wonderful house museums celebrating famous people and their work. We have listed some of our favourites below:

Oliver Cromwell’s House - https://www.olivercromwellshouse.co.uk/

Sir John Soane Museum - http://www.soane.org/

Cowper Newton Museum https://cowperandnewtonmuseum.org.uk/

Dickens Museum - https://dickensmuseum.com/

keat’s House - https://keatsfoundation.com/keats-house-hampstead/

Dylan Thomas' Boat House http://www.dylanthomasboathouse.com/

Dr Jenner's House - http://www.jennermuseum.com/

Jane Austen's House - http://www.jane-austens-house-museum.org.uk/about/about.htm

The Brontë's Parsonage, Haworth, West Yorks. https://www.bronte.org.uk/about-us

Robert Burns House -http://www.burnsmuseum.org.uk/

Virginia Woolf's 'Monks House' - http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/monks-house/

Winston Churchill's 'Chartwell' http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/chartwell/