The Ruskin Museum opened in 1901, founded by the artist and antiquarian W. G. Collingwood, who had spent years working as secretary to the art critic John Ruskin. Ruskin had lived at Brantwood on the eastern shore of Coniston Water from 1872 until his death in 1900, and is buried in Coniston churchyard. Collingwood's museum was both a memorial to his friend and employer and a local museum for the village - rolled together in a single small building. It is constituted as a charity called The Coniston Institute and Ruskin Museum. The collections cover Ruskin's life and work, the copper and slate mines of the surrounding fells, geology, lace making, farming, and the children's author Arthur Ransome, whose Swallows and Amazons drew partly on Coniston Water.

Walk into the museum garden and you find Riverdale - more than sixty miniature buildings handmade by a local builder, John Usher (1940-1993). Houses, bridges, farm structures, all in slate and stone, each modelled on the kind of vernacular Lakeland architecture that surrounds Coniston in life-size. Usher built them at his home, Brow Head, and after his death the largest collection was rehomed at the museum in 1999. It is the kind of detail that gives a country museum away as something more particular than the standard pattern: someone here cared not just about famous men but about how local builders thought, and what they made for love.

The Donald Campbell story haunts the building. Campbell died on Coniston Water on 4 January 1967, attempting a new world water speed record in Bluebird K7 after already breaking 320 mph. The wreck stayed on the lake bed for thirty-four years before a private diver, Bill Smith, raised it in 2001. On 7 December 2006, Donald's daughter Gina Campbell, on behalf of the Campbell Family Heritage Trust, formally donated the recovered material - the boat, parts both recovered and unrecovered, even Donald's clothing and overalls - to the Ruskin Museum. Smith agreed to organise the restoration at no cost. "I've decided to secure the future of Bluebird for the people of Coniston, the Ruskin Museum and the people of the world," Gina said at the time. The museum built a dedicated wing to receive the boat, finished in 2010.

What followed turned into one of the long, painful disputes that small museums and dedicated restorers sometimes generate. By September 2021 the BBC reported that relations between the museum and the Bluebird Project had broken down so completely that dismantling the restored boat looked, briefly, like the only resolution. The Ruskin Museum served legal papers on Bill Smith and Bluebird Project Ltd in February 2023. A court order eventually ruled that the boat and its associated parts belonged to the museum under the 2006 Deed of Gift, with Smith and the Bluebird Project paying their own legal costs and an agreed £25,000 to the museum. Bluebird arrived back in Coniston on 9 March 2024, after twenty-three years away. The museum has announced plans to run K7 on Coniston Water in 2026 - the first time the boat will move under its own power on the lake since 1967. The Ruskin Museum's larger story - of the 1980s rescue from "at risk" status, the £850,000 lottery-funded extension reopened by Culture Secretary Chris Smith in May 2000, and the 2017-18 copper-tiled kiosk by architect Takeshi Hayatsu - now folds neatly around that single returning artefact.