Kettle's Yard
A collector's home turned University gallery, kept as its owners left it, beside a modern exhibition space.
Kettle's Yard combines a house and a gallery on Castle Street, a few doors from the Museum of Cambridge. It began as the home of the collector Jim Ede and his wife Helen, who arrived in Cambridge in 1956 and joined four small cottages into a single house for living in and for showing paintings, sculpture and objects.
The house
Ede ran the place as an open house every afternoon, taking visitors, students especially, round the collection himself. Much of it reflects friendships made while he worked at the Tate Gallery, so it leans towards British modernists of the first half of the twentieth century. Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, Alfred Wallis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska are among the artists represented, alongside Brancusi and Miro. Found objects such as pebbles sit among the pictures on purpose. The poet Ian Hamilton Finlay called Ede's blend of art and found things "the Louvre of the pebble".
The University of Cambridge received house and contents as a gift from Ede in 1966; he stayed on until he left for Edinburgh in 1973. The interior is still arranged as the Edes left it.
The gallery
A purpose-built exhibition space, deliberately modern in manner, was bolted on in 1970. Both parts of the site closed in June 2015 for a building project that brought a four-floor education wing, new exhibition rooms, a courtyard entrance, a cafe and a shop. The house interior was left untouched, and the whole site reopened in February 2018.
Practical notes
Opening days, ticketing and any booking arrangements for the house are not confirmed here, so check the official website before you set out. Kettle's Yard belongs to the University's museums consortium, alongside the Fitzwilliam Museum.
Nearby
Within a few minutes' walk
