Kettles Yard

Kettle's Yard is a house-museum on Castle Street, near the art and architecture schools at the north edge of the city. It was the home of Jim Ede, a former Tate curator, who between 1958 and 1973 opened it to Cambridge students every afternoon so they could sit with his collection of 20th-century art — works by Ben Nicholson, Alfred Wallis, Christopher Wood, and Brancusi sculpture displayed on domestic shelves and windowsills alongside natural objects: pebbles, shells, glass, driftwood.

The house has been preserved exactly as Ede arranged it, and a modern gallery extension has been added next door. It is one of the most distinctive art experiences in England — intimate, domestic, and deliberately ungrand. Free admission to the house and gallery; open Tuesday to Sunday.

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A story
Jim Ede, who ran Kettle's Yard, had an unusual policy: students could borrow works from the collection and take them to their rooms for a term. The idea was that living with art — not just visiting it in a gallery — was how you learned to see. The policy continues today. Cambridge undergraduates can still apply to borrow pieces from a gallery that holds work by Ben Nicholson, Christopher Wood, and Constantin Brancusi.

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