Museum and Art Swindon

Museum Art Swindon looks after thousands of objects, specimens, artworks and ephemera, collected from the early 1900s up until today.

The Museum was founded by Charles Gore in 1919 as a place to display his extensive geological collections. Through time the collections have become more focussed on Swindon and the surrounding areas and hold objects dating from prehistory to the present day showing the development of the local area and the people who lived in it.

The modern and contemporary British art collection at Museum Art Swindon was established in 1941 by an impressive donation of 21 works by a local businessman HJP Bomford. Since then that collection has been built on and today is of national significance, comprising hundreds of artworks, including paintings, works on paper and sculpture by prominent modern artists including Howard Hodgkin, Vanessa Bell and L.S. Lowry. The museum also holds an excellent collection of studio ceramics and a large number of local artworks, documenting the transformation of Swindon since the 19th century.