Top Hat Tours: Spring 2012

In 2011 we went to:

The Whitworth and Manchester City Galleries

The Lady Lever and Walker Galleries, Liverpool

Plas Newydd, the Ruthin Craft Centre and Nantclwyd House

Bath and the American Musum

Bristol and Tyntesfield

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

Morville Hall Gardens and Attingham Park

Thursday 26 April 2012

On Thursday 26th April for our second Tour of the season we are staying in the county but going to two venues you may not have visited. Our main stop is Attingham Park to see the group exhibition ‘House of Beasts’ which can be found in the stables, mansion and parkland of this National Trust property near Shrewsbury. The show includes new commissions and existing work directly inspired by Attingham's history and responding to its rich collections. The works investigate our relationship with those animals who live in close proximity to us or share our living space, whether domestic, wild or managed. These relationships can range from highly emotional ties, as in the case of pets or horses, to purely economical. They can be based on admiration or curiosity as in the case of birds or butterflies, or prove frankly antagonistic as with the various pests that roam around us.

Attingham Park was built in 1785 and was owned by the same family for more than 160 years. The magnificent Regency interiors were created to reflect the delicate elegance of the time and the collections include ambassadorial silver, Italian furniture and Grand Tour paintings collected by the third Lord Berwick. It looks out over 500 acres of parkland, and is set in a deer park, landscaped by the great Humphrey Repton. The icehouse and greenhouses are newly restored while restoration work continues on the Nash staircase and Lady Berwick's sitting room.

On our way to Attingham we will call in at The Dower House Garden within the grounds of Morville Hall, near Bridgnorth. The garden aims to tell the history of English gardening in a sequence of separate gardens designed in the style of different historical periods. Particular attention is given to the use of authentic plants and construction techniques. When we visit the tulips and other bulbs as well as the fruit blossom should be at their best. The garden was designed by Katherine Swift, the garden historian and writer, who has lived at The Dower House since 1988. Her book about making the garden, entitled The Morville Hours, was published in 2008 and was serialised on BBC Radio 4 as 'Book of the Week'.

Timings: The coach departs from Corve Street (Parkway, outside the florist Floribunda) at 9.00 am; arrives Morville at about 9.30 am; departs Morville at about 11.00 am and arrives at Attingham at about 11.30 am; departs Attingham at about 4.30 pm; arriving in Ludlow at about 5.30 pm.

Charges: Coach fare: £16.00 or £14.00 for Friends of the Silk Top Hat Gallery or of the Ludlow Assembly Rooms and members of the Ludlow Civic Society; Morville admission £7.50 including coffee and biscuits; Attingham admission £8.40, free for National Trust members (but remember that you need to bring your membership card with you).

Closing date for bookings: April 12th. Late bookings are acceptable if there is room on the coach but we need to reach viable numbers by the closing date when we have to confirm the coach booking so it helps us if you book before the closing date.

Bath

Thursday 31st May 2012

When we visited Bath in June last year we spent time in the city, particularly the Holburne Museum, before travelling to the American Museum nearby in Claverton. There was a general feeling that there was much more to see and do in Bath, so we hope to return on Thursday 24th May. The drop off, as before, will be by the newly refurbished Holburne but, this time, there will be time to seek out some of the other treasures of the city.

The Holburne Museum of Art sits at the end of Great Pulteney Street, the culmination of one of the most beautiful Georgian vistas in Britain. The Grade 1 listed villa, originally built as a hotel, is home to an intimate collection of seventeenth and eighteenth century paintings and decorative art. This gem-like museum has recently reopened after a three-year closure and the completion of a bold ceramic and glass extension. The new building, designed by Eric Parry, is at the back of the older one, looking out onto pleasure gardens where Jane Austen once walked. As well as doubling the museum’s display space, it houses the museum’s restaurant - tables spill out onto the lawn in good weather. The museum is a ten-minute walk from the city centre. The museum is fully accessible and admission is free.

Upstairs are the museum’s collections where the approach to story telling is particularly evident in the Fletcher Gallery, where themes in 18th-century culture, such as the rise of consumerism, are told through a mixed presentation of porcelain, paintings and sculpture. In the hotel’s former ballroom the silver and china are laid out as though for a banquet, sparkling under a crystal chandelier, while glamorous members of 17th-century society look down from the walls. A smaller, more densely hung space is devoted to the collection of Sir William Holburne (1793-1874), which formed the foundation for the museum. It is easy to see his enjoyment of small-scale Dutch cabinet pictures and his predilection for miniature objects such as perfume bottles, engraved gems and painted miniatures. On the top floor are portraits and conversation pieces from the Golden Age of British painting. Many of them hark back to Bath’s heyday as a fashionable spa, when the city was second only to London as an important artistic centre. Thomas Hoare of Bath and Thomas Gainsborough found plenty of work here, and their works are hung alongside canvases by Lawrence, Ramsay, Stubbs and Zoffany. A small number of theatrical portraits that once belonged to Somerset Maugham grace one of the walls.

The special exhibition coinciding with our visit will be ‘Presence: the Art of Portrait Sculpture’ which will bring together some of the most striking sculpted portraits from the ancient world to the modern day. It includes astonishing heads from Ancient Greece and Rome; eighteenth century masterpieces; works by some of the 20th century’s greatest sculptors including Giacometti and Brancusi, the waxwork of Henry Moore once at Madame Tussaud’s and sculptures by such major contemporary artists as Marc Quinn and Ron Mueck. With exceptionally generous and important loans from the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and Tate, as well as from regional and private collections the exhibition collects together many supreme examples of the sculptor’s art. Admission £6.95/ concessions.

No.1 Royal Crescent is a magnificently restored Georgian town house that creates a wonderfully vital picture of life in Georgian Bath. The Royal Crescent is justly considered one of the finest achievements of 18th century urban architecture and represents the highest point of Palladian architecture in Bath. No.1 was the first house to be built in the Crescent and originally provided luxury accommodation for the aristocratic visitors who came to take the waters and enjoy the social season.

The Victoria Gallery’s collections range from the fifteenth century to the present day and were formed mainly by gift and bequest since the building first opened in 1900. A recent donation of drinking glasses and scent bottles is on display in the Upper Gallery.

Bath’s Assembly Rooms were at the heart of fashionable Georgian society, the perfect venue for entertainment. When completed in 1771, they were described as ‘the most noble and elegant of any in the kingdom’. The Fashion Museum is on the lower ground floor and brings to life the story of fashion over the last 400 years, ‘the finest museum of fashionable garments in the world’.

Timings: The coach departs from Corve Street (Parkway, outside the florist Floribunda) at 9.00 am; arrives in Bath at about 11.00 am (but please note that traffic going into the city can be very delayed); departs Bath at 4.30 pm and arrives in Ludlow at about 6.30 pm

Charges: Coach fare: £20.00 or £18.00 for Friends of the Silk Top Hat Gallery or of Ludlow Assembly Rooms and members of Ludlow Civic Society

Closing date for bookings: 17th May. Late bookings are acceptable if there is room on the coach but we need to reach viable numbers by the closing date when we have to confirm the coach booking so it helps us if you book before the closing date.

KELMSCOTT AND BROADWAY

Thursday 28th June 2012

We last visited Kelmscott in May 2009 but a return visit has been requested. Kelmscott Manor, a grade 1 listed farmhouse adjacent to the River Thames, was built around 1600, with an additional wing added to the north east corner in about 1665. The Manor is built of local limestone on the edge of the village of Kelmscott. William Morris chose it as his summer home, signing a joint lease with the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the summer of 1871. Morris loved the house as a work of true craftsmanship, totally unspoilt and unaltered, and in harmony with the village and the surrounding countryside. He considered it so natural in its setting as to be almost organic, it looked to him as if it had ‘grown up out of the soil’; and with ‘quaint garrets amongst great timbers of the roof where of old times the tillers and herdsmen slept’. Its beautiful gardens, with barns, dovecote, a meadow and stream, provided a constant source of inspiration. The house - perhaps the most evocative of all the houses associated with Morris - contains an outstanding collection of the possessions and works of Morris, his family and associates (Benson, Burne-Jones, Rossetti and Webb amongst them), including furniture, original textiles, pictures, carpets, ceramics and metalwork.

William Morris, his wife Jane and children Jenny and May are buried in the grounds of St George's church, Kelmscott. In the village are cottages designed by Webb and Gimson and the Morris Memorial Hall (also Gimson) - all of which have associations with the Morris family.

On the way back from Kelmscott we will stop at Broadway. This Cotswolds village is often referred to as the ‘Jewel of the Cotswolds’ and the ‘Show Village of England’ because of its sheer beauty and magnificence. The ‘broad way’ leads from the foot of the western Cotwolds escarpment with a wide grass-fringed street lined with ancient honey coloured limestone buildings dating back to the sixteenth century. The village has one of the longest High Streets in England and is nestled at the foot of Fish Hill (where apparently monks used to store fish and the eighteenth century ‘Fish Inn’ once stood). Broadway Tower stands on top of the hill overlooking the village and was a much loved retreat for the Arts and Crafts Movement founder William Morris.

Broadway village became a busy staging post on the route from Worcester to London as coaches had to harness extra horses for the long pull up Fish Hill. As many as thirty-three inns existed within the village to service the many travellers passing through - three exist today. It was the inspiration for a number of writers and artists including Henry James, J. M. Barrie, Vaughan Williams, Elgar, John Singer Sargent, and William Morris.

Timings: The coach departs from Corve Street (Parkway, outside the florist Floribunda) at 9.00 am; arrives at Kelmscott at about 11.00 am; the stewarded tour starts with tea or coffee and a thirty minute introduction, following which you may wander round the house;we will call at Broadway on the way back from Kelmscott arriving at Ludlow at about 6.00 pm

Charges: Coach fare: £20.00 or £18.00 for Friends of the Silk Top Hat Gallery or of Ludlow Assembly Rooms and members of Ludlow Civic Society

Closing date for bookings: 14th June. Late bookings are acceptable if there is room on the coach but we need to reach viable numbers by the closing date when we have to confirm the coach booking so it helps us if you book before the closing date.