Compton Verney

Now an art gallery set within 120 acres of parkland, Compton Verney was saved from ruin by businessman, art collector and philanthropist Peter Moores through the Peter Moores Foundation. A £45m project restored the site’s Grade I-listed Georgian mansion from near dereliction, while an 11-year project to reinstate landscape designs by Capability Brown is ongoing. Filled with history, Compton Verney’s collections, programme and grounds offer plentiful highlights for visitors.

These include the Grade I listed chapel and 18th century ice house, both constructed during Capability Brown’s transformation of the formal gardens into a ‘natural’ landscape. At the mansion itself, the Women’s Library is one of the few surviving parts from the 19th century; created in 1860 by Georgiana Verney, a champion of women’s literacy and suffrage, the library now invites a new guest curator to fill the shelves each year.

Compton Verney’s six internationally acclaimed collections are no less impressive. The resident British Folk Art collection is the largest in the UK, British Portraits features figures who’ve shaped the nation’s history, and the Chinese collection centres on ancient Chinese objects buried with the dead. Naples covers the Neapolitan Golden Age, Northern Europe spans the 15th and 16th centuries, and the Marx-Lambert collection covers English popular art.

Together with Compton Verney’s special exhibitions, events, restaurant and shop, the collections are a compelling reason to visit. So too is the beauty of the site, which saw it become the setting for Peter Hall’s film of A Midsummer’s Night Dream, starring a young Judi Dench and Helen Mirram.