Warwickshire art gallery receives £2.5m towards restoring its historic landscape
Award-winning national art museum Compton Verney project aims to preserve, restore and celebrate an outstanding ‘Capability’ Brown park, which includes a rare, Brown-designed and Grade I-listed Chapel.
Compton Verney has recieved £2.5 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund towards the gallery’s Landscape Restoration Project. The project seeks to restore Compton Verney’s outstanding landscape and enliven it with eyecatching additions and activities which highlight the site’s history of art and architecture. The project will also restore the ‘Capability’ Brown Chapel of the 1770s as a venue for music and events
A new Visitor Welcome Centre will also be built to provide materials about the site’s landscape, history and ecology as well as provide visitor facilities.
The project will secure and develop the biodiversity of the parkland and recreate original Georgian pathways so visitors can view forest, wetland and meadow habitats while enjoying Brown’s original sightlines. Brown’s landscape will be used as a platform to bring together a range of interests – art, architecture, landscape design, health and wellbeing, music, history, and ecology to engage visitors in different ways.
Dr Steven Parissien, Director of Compton Verney, said: “Compton Verney has enriched the regional cultural landscape for the past ten years, and this grant will enable us to fully exploit and harness the astonishing potential of our historic context, thus benefiting both the local community and visitors from further afield.”
