Twickenham Museum
A compact, object-led survey of Twickenham, Strawberry Hill and the Thames islands that shaped them. Displays braid together literary Twickenham (Pope and Walpole), river life, and the 20th-century music scene on Eel Pie Island. Expect maps, prints, ephemera and small-but-telling artefacts that anchor big stories to specific streets and river bends.
Opening Hours
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
Inspire your Friends
- 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.
