Qualla: Tenby Museum and Art Gallery

Tenby Museum and Art Gallery: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ian S, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1877, a retired Oxford professor of anatomy named George Rolleston was digging in caves near Tenby alongside an amateur archaeologist called Edward Laws. They were finding bones, flints, and the unmistakable traces of human habitation in some of the oldest occupied caves in Britain. The following year, Laws asked Rolleston to come back and open something - a museum, founded on the site of a ruined Norman castle, dedicated to the geology, biology, and human history of this corner of Wales. Rolleston accepted. On 26 July 1878, the Tenby Museum opened. It has never closed.

Image: Ian S | CC BY-SA 2.0

Tenby Museum and Art Gallery: Castle Hill

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Broster, CC BY-SA 4.0. The museum sits inside the medieval Castle of Tenby, on the headland that separates the North Beach from the South Sands. Most of the castle is ruin now - it had already been ruined for centuries by the time the museum moved in - but the surviving keep and walls form an unmistaka...

Image: Peter Broster | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tenby Museum and Art Gallery: The Founders

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Broster, CC BY-SA 4.0. Edward Laws was the prime mover. Born in 1837, he had time and money and the kind of restless curiosity that made him write three books - The History of Little England beyond Wales, The Church Book of St Mary the Virgin, and The Civil War in Pembrokeshire - while also serving as ...

Image: Peter Broster | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tenby Museum and Art Gallery: The Johns

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Polibil, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1976 the museum opened the Wilfred Harrison Art Gallery, and in 1995 the New Art Gallery joined it. The collection now includes works by two artists who grew up just down the coast: Augustus John and his sister Gwen John, born in Tenby and Haverfordwest respectively, both of w...

Image: Polibil | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tenby Museum and Art Gallery: Shoestring Award

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Broster, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1993 the museum won the Prince of Wales Award for restoration. In 1996 it won the Shoestring Award - the United Kingdom prize for the museum that achieves the most with the least money. The Shoestring matters in Tenby because the budget has always been small and the standards ...

Image: Peter Broster | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tenby Museum and Art Gallery: What's Inside

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Broster, CC BY-SA 4.0. The collection ranges across local geology, biology, archaeology, maritime history, and the long Welsh tradition of piracy along the Bristol Channel - this was, for centuries, a coast where smuggling was a normal business. Cave-bear teeth share cabinets with Bronze Age pottery; A...

Image: Peter Broster | CC BY-SA 4.0