The Red Lodge Museum on Park Row is one of Bristol's hidden gems — a small Tudor building largely invisible from the street, containing a remarkable set of 16th-century carved wood panelled rooms alongside a Georgian parlour. The house was built around 1590 as a gatehouse to the Great House below (which no longer exists), and the Elizabethan interiors on the ground floor are among the best-preserved of their kind in any English domestic building.
The carved stone chimneypieces, Elizabethan plasterwork, and oak panelling in the Tudor rooms are of exceptional quality. The house's later history — as a reformatory school for girls run by the social reformer Mary Carpenter in the Victorian era — adds another layer of interest. The museum is free to enter and rarely crowded; most visitors to Park Street and the university area walk straight past it without knowing it is there.