Emery Walker's House on Shortlist for Apollo Award

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Preserved Hammersmith Arts & Crafts home among Museum Openings of the Year

 

Emery Walker's House in Hammersmith Terrace, the best preserved Arts & Crafts home in Britain has been shortlisted for this year’s prestigious Museum Opening of the Year Award by Apollo magazine.

Dating back to 1992, the Apollo Awards celebrate major achievements in the art and museum worlds and Emery Walker’s House was one of just six international museums shortlisted in the opening category.

Emery Walker’s House at 7 Hammersmith Terrace, a modest Georgian terraced house crammed with Arts & Crafts treasures, reopened in Hammersmith, West London this April after an 18 month closure. It was the home of one of the key members of The Arts & Crafts Movement, a close friend of William Morris and father of the Private Press movement.

During the closure, contents of Sir Emery’s riverside home – around 6,000 items - were removed for cataloguing and conservation. This allowed for vital repair work creating a safer environment for the house’s remarkable collection.

The project, costing nearly £1million was supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund through the Arts & Crafts Hammersmith project, a joint initiative with The William Morris Society, for which match funding was found from charitable trusts and individual donations.

The house's modest size and fragility means only eight visitors can visit on just two days a week between March and November. The final guided tours take place next week and are fully booked, and tours from March 2018 can be booked on its new website at here.

Next year the house will also be made more accessible through a virtual tour and the Trust’s archives will be available online.

Michael Hall, Chair of The Emery Walker Trust, said: "We are thrilled to be shortlisted for this prestigious award – it is a great honour to be up there alongside such institutions as the National Gallery of Ireland and Freer Gallery of Art, Washington.

"The Emery Walker Trust and its steadfast volunteers have been working to preserve Emery Walker’s House for many years. We are delighted that our endeavours to restore this Arts & Crafts treasure and to share it with the public have been recognised by such an authoritative source as Apollo."

April 21, 2017