Lakeland Arts is a major player in the north of England’s arts, culture and heritage scene. We’ve built a great reputation for our historic buildings, museums, gallery collections and rolling arts programmes.
In this part of the UK, where there is limited cultural provision, Lakeland Arts has responded consistently to this need at its venues and in the community for over sixty years. It provides a vital public cultural and heritage service to audiences around Cumbria and the more than 40 million domestic and international visitors who are attracted to the area and contribute to the local economy each year. At each of our sites, we have saved, and made accessible, important historic buildings and significant collections for the people of Cumbria and beyond.
We represent the lives of the people of Cumbria past and present. They inform and steer our stimulating, award-winning attractions: Abbot Hall; Blackwell; Lakeland Museum and Windemere Jetty Museum. We connect with our visitors on land and on water.
Together we learn and we grow, exploring the past to make a better future. Rooted in our landscape and history, we reach out to the world, a living memory reflecting the depth of Lakeland life.
Based in South Lakeland, in the Lake District UNESCO World Heritage Site, Lakeland Arts is one of the most remarkable arts and heritage organisations in the North. We look after an exceptional portfolio of heritage buildings and collections, located amid magnificent land- and townscapes that have inspired generations, from Wordsworth via Kurt Schwitters to Taylor Swift. This cultural and natural heritage attracts audiences from all over the world.
Founded in 1957 to save Abbot Hall from demolition and transform the Georgian house into “an Art Gallery for the Lake District”, we now have four sites:
Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, which opened in 1962, is an important cultural destination. It is home to a nationally significant art collection, one of the largest of its kind in the North. Spanning the historic to contemporary art, over 50% of the collection is focused on landscape. The collection includes watercolours by J M W Turner and John Ruskin, a strong Modern British collection including works by Lucian Freud and Bridget Riley, and the work of European Modernist Kurt Schwitters, created during his final years in Cumbria.
Lakeland Museum, Kendal, opened in 1971 as a radical departure from social history museums of the past. It was set up as a Folk Museum, dedicated to the collection of objects and stories about Cumbria and the Lake District. More recently, we have started working with local communities in creating our exhibitions and projects to better capture under-represented stories.
Blackwell, Bowness, was designed by the architect Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott and completed in 1901. The house contains one of the best examples in the world of an original Arts & Crafts interior. Since opening to the public in 2001, Blackwell has established a reputation for scholarly Arts & Crafts exhibitions. The house has become a hub for the display of modern and contemporary ceramics and for showing and supporting early- to mid-career arts and crafts makers.
Windermere Jetty Museum opened in 2019. This award-winning museum on the shore of Lake Windermere showcases the sights, smells and sounds of life on the Lake. It conserves and displays an internationally important collection of boats, particularly steamboats, dating from pre-1320 through to the late twentieth century, all associated with Windermere. The collection of 40 vessels is highly significant as part of the UK’s dispersed national boat and maritime collection and is recognised by the UK Government as “the most important and coherent collection of watercraft generic to one particular location in existence anywhere in the world.”
