Qualla: Red Lodge Museum

Red Lodge Museum: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Red Lodge Museum, Bristol.jpg: Original uploader was Rodw at en.wikipedia derivative work: Jezhotwells (talk), Public domain. Queen Elizabeth I came to Bristol in 1574 and stayed with the Young family at their Great House on St Augustine's Back. She knighted Sir John Young there. Sixteen years later, his widow Dame Joan finished the building behind the Great House - a guest lodge at the top of the gardens, where the family could entertain visitors after walking them through eight ornamental gardens and orchards. The arms of Young impaling Wadham, Joan's family, are still carved above the porch of the Great Oak Room. The Great House is gone - the Bristol Beacon concert hall stands on its site now. But the lodge is still here, and inside, the Great Oak Room remains one of the finest Elizabethan interiors in the West Country.

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Image: Red Lodge Museum, Bristol.jpg: Original uploader was Rodw at en.wikipedia derivative work: Jezhotwells (talk) | Public domain

Red Lodge Museum: A garden room for a queen's friends

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Rodw at English Wikipedia., Public domain. Construction began in 1579, possibly to a design by the Italian architect Sebastiano Serlio - though no one is sure. What's certain is that the Red Lodge was never meant to be a house. It was a pavilion: a place to take wine, to admire the gardens, to keep guests entertained betw...

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Image: The original uploader was Rodw at English Wikipedia. | Public domain

Red Lodge Museum: Oak panelling, an anatomy theatre, and a topless statue

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ceridwen, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Great Oak Room is the building's masterpiece - original sixteenth-century oak panelling, a moulded plaster ceiling, and a double-decker fireplace that the building's own museum describes as making it one of the finest rooms in the West Country. In the 1730s, John and Mary Hen...

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Image: ceridwen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Red Lodge Museum: Mary Carpenter's reform school

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Climatophile, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1854, Lady Byron - using money from the endowment of her husband, the poet Lord Byron - bought the Red Lodge and gave it to Mary Carpenter. Carpenter was a Unitarian reformer who had already opened a ragged school in Bristol for the city's poorest children. Now she founded som...

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Image: Climatophile | CC BY-SA 3.0

Red Lodge Museum: A portrait, a chair, and a question

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Climatophile, CC BY-SA 3.0. In the Small Oak Room hangs a portrait of Florence Smyth, of the Smyth family of Ashton Court. Beside her stands a young Black boy, unnamed. The painting has no identification of the child - no record of who he was, where he came from, or how he came to be in the household. He ma...

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Image: Climatophile | CC BY-SA 3.0

Red Lodge Museum: Saved by an arts society

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Climatophile, CC BY-SA 3.0. By 1919, the historic interior was at risk of being torn out and sold piecemeal. James Fuller Eberle stepped in, buying the building for the Bristol Savages (now called Bristol 1904 Arts) and the Bristol Corporation. The arts society took the Victorian laundry as their studio; th...

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Image: Climatophile | CC BY-SA 3.0