Keswick Museum and Art Gallery

The Keswick Museum and Art Gallery is a museum in Keswick in the English Lake District which reopened in 2014 after extensive refurbishment of its purpose-built 1898 building. Its varied collections feature Keswick’s landscape, history and culture. The Mountain Heritage Trust maintains a changing exhibition in the museum, which in 2014 focused on the effect of World War I on the climbing community.

The museum and art gallery is owned by Allerdale Borough Council and run by the largely volunteer Keswick Museum and Art Gallery Management Ltd.

The museum was founded in 1873 and had a number of temporary homes as it grew, including The Moot Hall in Keswick town centre.

A building was purpose built for it, in Fitz Park, partly as a memorial to the Hewetson brothers, distinguished Keswick benefactors, and to commemorate the jubilee of Queen Victoria. It remains the only purpose-built museum in the county.

The two original galleries were the Main Gallery and the Model Gallery, the latter built especially for Flintoft's famous model of the Lake District.

The building work started in 1897 and the grand opening was on Easter Monday, 11 April 1898.

The 'Picture Gallery' was added later, through the energies of Canon Rawnsley, a museum trustee and one of the founders of the National Trust. It opened in July 1906 with its first exhibition held by The Lake Artists Society.

The Fitz Park Trust, which was founded in 1882, took over the running of the museum and kept it and Fitz Park for the enjoyment of "the inhabitants of Keswick and the visitors thereto", until 1994.

The Museum was handed over to the Borough Council for financial reasons, in April 1994, and the park to the Town Council. Both are kept as charitable trusts on behalf of the local people.

In February 2007, Keswick Museum and Art Gallery Management Limited was formed; a company made up of local people, who now run the Museum on behalf of Allerdale Borough Council, the sole trustee.

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