#181
Opening Hours
Sunday: 14:00 – 16:00
Friday: 11:00 – 15:00
Saturday: 11:00 – 15:00
What's not to miss inside?
Alexander Pope’s Twickenham
Pins the Augustan poet to a real landscape—his villa on the Thames and the famed grotto beneath it.Engravings, plans and memorabilia trace how Pope engineered his riverside garden and tunnelled a shell-and-mineral grotto under the road.
📍 Local Lives / Literature case
Strawberry Hill & the Gothic Revival
Shows how Horace Walpole’s villa (1749–76) rewrote taste—mock-medieval forms inspiring a national style.Early prints and guidebook ephemera reveal how a private fantasy house became a tourist site with timed ‘showings’.
📍 Architecture & Places section
Eel Pie Island: The Beat Boom
Connects a tiny Thames island hotel to the 1960s R&B explosion.Posters, tickets and photos chart residencies by emergent bands and the scene that incubated British rock.
📍 Music & Leisure display
🤓 Fun Facts
Pope’s Twickenham villa was demolished in 1808; the subterranean grotto—lined with shells, ores and crystals—survived, making it one of Britain’s earliest preserved poet-made garden features.
Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill House is a foundational Gothic Revival project (begun 1749), documented through visitor tickets and early guidebooks that helped codify ‘Gothic taste’.
Eel Pie Island Hotel hosted formative 1960s gigs—posters and handbills record appearances by leading R&B acts before mainstream fame.
J. M. W. Turner designed and built Sandycombe Lodge (1813) in Twickenham as a retreat; local views and maps in the museum situate the painter’s walks along the same river reaches.
