Walk in Bristol
with Richie
Red
Lodge
Museum
5 Nearest Attraction
(482 foot - 2 min walking)
(0,1 mile - 3 min walking)
3. Bristol Museum and Art Gallery
(0,3 mile - 6 min walking)
(0,3 mile - 6 min walking)
(0,4 mile - 10 min walking)
​
Click to the postcode to check the map .
Nearest Public Toilet
​
Watershed
(Community Toilet Scheme)
Accessible
1 Cannons Road, Harbourside, Bristol, BS1 5TX​
Official website:
https://www.bristolmuseums.org.uk/red-lodge-museum/
Tel: 0117 921 1360
The Red Lodge Museum is a historic house museum in Bristol, England.
The original building was Tudor/Elizabethan, and construction began in 1579–1580, possibly to the design of Serlio. The main additional building phases are from the 1730s and the early 19th century.
The Red Lodge is a free museum but runs on donations, and is managed as a branch of Bristol City Council.
Richie's opinion :
"If you watch to the the building of the Red Lodge Museum from the Park Row, it offers a pictureque view to you with the red door.
First of all it interested me in its relevant of Byron (I like the mysteries and legends about Lord George Gordon Byron).
The interior of the house itself was a bit of a disappointment to me, because I walked around faster it ,than the Georgian House Museum.
Nonetheless, the museum's furnishings are beautiful, the “mirror” at the turn of the stairs gave me a little Harry Potter feeling, and if we pay attention to the Notable features, we love the elegant, old furnitures, we care about the history of the house, I think it is a must-see attraction of Bristol."
About the Red Lodge Museum
The Red Lodge Museum is a historic house museum in Bristol.
The original building was Tudor/Elizabethan, and construction began in 1579–1580, possibly to the design of Sebastiano Serlio.
The main additional building phases are from the 1730s and the early 19th century.
The Red Lodge is a free museum but runs on donations, and is managed as a branch of Bristol City Council.
Opening Times
The museum is open from 1 April to 31 December on Saturdays, Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays, 11 am – 4 pm.
Parking
You can park in any of the city car parks but the closest is Trenchard Street (BS1 5AN), about two minute walk away.
​
Facilities
There are seven rooms over two floors which tell the history of the house, from its Tudor origins to its role as a Victorian girls’ reform school.
There are standard toilets available on the ground floor with a small step to the toilet room.
​
Access
Access to the museum is via the red door on Park Row. Immediately upon entering there is a flight of nine stone steps and a further flight of stairs into the house, as well as stairs to all floors and to the garden.
History
Notable features
​
Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I
The Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I is in the Great Oak Room. It has recently been assessed as an original, painted in the late 16th century.
Speke Chair/Table
The chair in the Great Oak Room folds down so that the back turns into the table-top. Hybrid furniture was not uncommon in the Tudor period (i.e. Chests used as tables and chairs).The Speke family are an aristocratic family from near Ilminster, Somerset.
Portrait of Florence Smyth and her black "Page"
In the Small Oak Room is a portrait of Florence Smyth, of the Smyth Family and her black ‘page’. There is no information on the identity of the boy in the portrait, so it can't be said whether the boy is a slave, a servant, or a peer of Florence's. If the boy is a slave then it is probably the earliest depiction of a slave in the UK.
Mary Carpenter's Piano
The piano in the Mary Carpenter Room is the original Broadwood piano bought by Mary Carpenter in 1845.
The fabric panel on the front of a Broadwood is usually made from silk, so it is possible that the fabric and embroidery on this one were a project for the school girls.
18th-Century Spinet
The Spinet in the Print Room was made by Benjamin Slade in 1702.It has been at the Red Lodge since at least 1935 when Alec Hodson restored it.The Museum and the Bristol Savages tune it every year and it is used as part of the Savages' festivities.
Walnut Bureau with hidden compartments
The Walnut Bureau and shelves in the Reception Room hide multiple hidden compartments.
The Skinner Chair
The Skinner Chair in the Parlour was carved for Bishop Robert Skinner in the late 17th century.
The story told in the relief is that of Actaeon the Hunter who angered Artemis and was punished by being turned into a deer and attacked by his own hunting party.
The back of the chair also carries the Arms of the Skinner family. The same Arms (impaled) are also featured on his grave in Worcester Cathedral.
The chair has been used on two royal occasions – Prince Albert sat on it in 1843 when he visited Bristol to launch Brunel's ship, the SS Great Britain, and Edward VII sat on it in 1908 when the Edward VII Dock was opened.
The Red Lodge was originally built at the top of the gardens of "ye Great House of St. Augustine's Back".
The Great House was built in 1568 on the site of an old Carmelite Priory, later still the site of Colston Hall (now Bristol Beacon), by Sir John Young/Yonge, the descendant of a merchant family and courtier to Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.
The Red Lodge would have originally been used as an additional guest house and entertainment pavilion, so that the Young family could promenade their guests through their eight ornamental gardens and orchards to wine and dine them.
Sir John Young died in 1589, and the Red Lodge was completed in 1590 by his widow Dame Joan. From an ancient Somerset and Devon family, Dame Joan was a sister and co-heiress of Nicholas Wadham, co-founder with his wife Dorothy Wadham of Wadham College, Oxford.
She was married firstly to Sir Giles Strangways (1528-1562) of Melbury Sampford and then to John Young, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth I when she stayed with the Youngs at The Great House on her visit to Bristol in 1574, and the arms of Young impaling Wadham are carved above the porch entrance to the Great Oak Room at the Red Lodge. A fine monument to Joan Wadham (1533–1603) with her recumbent effigy lies at the west entrance to nearby Bristol Cathedral.
Their son, Robert Young inherited the entire estate.
Robert quickly spent his inheritance and had to convey the Red Lodge to his half-brother Nicholas Strangways to avoid seizure.
By 1595, the building was rented out to various tenants as a residence separate from the Great House.
Robert Young eventually sold the Great House to Sir Hugh Smyth of Ashton Court.
In the 1730s, John and Mary Henley bought the Red Lodge and started major extension work on the north side, doubling the footprint of the building, fitting large Georgian windows, and rebuilding with hipped roofs and eaves, and cornices replacing gables, giving a full-height second floor.but made minimal changes to the Great Oak Room, Small Oak Room and Bedroom, leaving the rich Tudor decoration largely untouched.
Before the end of the extension work, John Henley died, leaving Mary Henley childless and unable to inherit.
John wrote into his will that Mary had the right to live in the Red Lodge for one month in every year.
This meant that the building could not be leased out long-term or sold to a new owner.
After the Henleys died the Red Lodge was leased to tenants practising medicine working at the Bristol Royal Infirmary, including James Cowles Pritchard who wrote Researches into the Physical History of Man, and Francis Cheyne Bowles and Richard Smith, who used the Great Oak Room as a dissection theatre.
In the 19th century, the current entrance to the building from Park Row was added, as well as the rooms to the East of the original core.
In 1854 the building was bought by Lady Byron, using Lord Byron’s endowment and given to Mary Carpenter to use as a school.
Mary Carpenter was a zealous reformer and founded the first ever Girls’ Reformatory at the Red Lodge to encapsulate her radical and progressive ideas of improvement and nurture for the nation's poor, in contrast to the harsh workhouses and prisons which were the common solution in the Victorian Era.
The Red Lodge was used as a reform school until 1917, during which time Carpenter used her standing as Superintendent to lobby parliamentary and travel the world researching the plight of ‘pauper children’.
In 1919, James Fuller Eberle saved the Red Lodge's historic interior from being pulled apart and sold piecemeal by buying the building for the Bristol Savages and the Bristol Corporation.
The Savages couldn't cope with the upkeep of the whole historic building, so CFW Dening built the Wigwam in the garden in 1920 and converted the Victorian Laundry into their studio, leaving the bulk of the Tudor, Georgian and Victorian building to the Corporation, which became Bristol City Council.
The Council renovated the building once in 1920 and again in 1956 before opening the Red Lodge as a museum.
From then onwards the building has been a branch of Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, along with The Georgian House Museum, Blaise Castle House Museum, Kings Weston Roman Villa and M Shed.
The next stages of development at the Red Lodge Museum are reinstating the fixtures of the New Oak Room and including interpretation for the well which was discovered; and re-ordering the garden paving to make it safe for visitors to enjoy.