Kettle's Yard

For 16 years, Kettle’s Yard was home to former Tate Gallery curator Jim Ede and his wife Helen, who filled it with artwork by some of the most exciting names in modern art. Expect to see work by Joan Miro, Henry Moore, and Barbara Hepworth, among many others.

But the true charm of this space lies in Jim’s arrangement of furniture and natural objects, combining texture and pattern to create an unusual and inspiring space. His aim was to showcase “a continuing way of life from these last fifty years, in which stray objects, stones, glass, pictures, sculpture, in light and in space, have been used to make manifest the underlying stability.”

Jim would run an “open house” for students and visitors every afternoon, providing personal guided tours of his collection. He even invited students to borrow art to display in their own rooms, a tradition that continues to this day.

The house remains much as Jim left it when he and Helen moved to Edinburgh in the 1970s, although the attached art gallery has been majorly refurbished in the last couple of years.