About
Broadway Museum & Art Gallery occupies Tudor House, a seventeenth-century building on the High Street of Broadway, one of the most visited villages in the Cotswolds, presenting fine and decorative art from the founding collections of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, alongside displays exploring the village's own history.
Opened in September 2013 through an unusual and ongoing partnership between the Ashmolean Museum, Worcestershire County Council, the Keil family and other local organisations, the museum was renamed Broadway Museum & Art Gallery in 2017 and continues to operate under a memorandum of understanding with the Ashmolean, whose curatorial staff provide advice, guidance and help curate a rotating programme of special exhibitions drawn from Oxford's collections.
This relationship gives a small village museum access to an extraordinary depth of material rarely available outside a major university institution: paintings, furniture and decorative objects tracing back to Elias Ashmole's founding gift to the University of Oxford in 1683, displayed across three floors of period rooms within the historic Tudor House.
Alongside these Ashmolean loans, the museum's own collection includes furniture donated by the antiques dealer H. W. Keil, whose family were instrumental in establishing the museum, together with Worcester porcelain and armorial ceramics connected to local Worcestershire families, weaving the village's own social and commercial history through the wider story of seventeenth-to-nineteenth-century English fine and decorative art.
Broadway itself, sometimes called the "Jewel of the Cotswolds" for its honey-coloured limestone buildings and wide High Street, has attracted visitors, artists and craftspeople for well over a century, and the museum's displays connect this local identity to the broader currents of English art history represented in its Ashmolean loans.
The arrangement stands as a distinctive model for how a major national collection can extend its reach and public benefit through a genuine, sustained partnership with a small independent local museum, rather than through occasional short-term loans, giving Broadway Museum & Art Gallery a curatorial depth well beyond what its modest scale might suggest.
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Plan Your Visit
⏱️ Recommended Visit Duration
📅 Best Times to Visit
Quietest: Monday, Tuesday
Busiest: Saturday
💡 Weekday mornings for the quietest visit, outside peak Cotswolds tourist traffic.
💡 Visitor Tips
- The museum's partnership with the Ashmolean means displays are periodically refreshed - check current exhibitions before visiting if you've been before.
- Closed on Sundays - plan a Monday-to-Saturday visit.
- Allow at least an hour to see all three floors of galleries properly.
- Combine your visit with the nearby Gordon Russell Museum for a fuller Broadway heritage day.
- Under-16s and Art Fund members enter free - bring your Art Fund card if you have one.
- Broadway's High Street car parks fill up on busy Cotswolds tourist days - arrive early or use Church Close car park.
- The historic building's upper floors are reached via stairs, so contact ahead if step-free access matters to you.
Highlights
Ashmolean Founding Collection Loans
The museum's most distinctive feature is its ongoing loan relationship with the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, through which paintings, furniture and decorative objects tracing back to Elias Ashmole's 1683 founding gift to the University of Oxford are displayed within Broadway's Tudor House.
This arrangement gives a small village museum sustained access to material of a depth and quality normally found only in major national or university collections, refreshed periodically through special exhibitions curated with Ashmolean staff, making repeat visits genuinely rewarding for visitors interested in English fine and decorative art history.
Tudor House Itself
The museum's home, Tudor House, is a seventeenth-century timber-framed building on Broadway's High Street whose historic rooms and architectural character form an integral part of the visitor experience, the period interiors providing an evocative setting for displaying fine art and furniture of a broadly contemporary date.
The building's survival through more than three centuries of Broadway's development, from working village through to its status as one of the most visited destinations in the Cotswolds, is itself part of the story the museum tells.
H. W. Keil Furniture Collection
Furniture donated by the antiques dealer H. W. Keil, whose family played an instrumental role in establishing the museum, forms a significant part of the collection, illustrating the connoisseurship and trade in historic English furniture that flourished through much of the twentieth century.
The Keil family's local connections to Broadway link this collection directly to the village's own commercial history as a centre for antiques dealing, a trade for which the area became well known.
Worcester Porcelain and Armorial Ceramics
Displays of Worcester porcelain and armorial ceramics connected to local Worcestershire families situate the museum's fine art holdings within a specifically regional decorative arts tradition, tracing the county's significant historic role in English porcelain manufacture alongside the material culture of the gentry and merchant families who commissioned bespoke armorial pieces.
Collections
Broadway Museum & Art Gallery's collection combines long-term loans from the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, drawn from its founding 1683 collections and refreshed through periodic special exhibitions, with the museum's own holdings of furniture donated by H. W. Keil, Worcester porcelain and armorial ceramics connected to local Worcestershire families.
Together these span fine and decorative art largely from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, displayed across three floors of period rooms within the historic Tudor House, alongside material documenting Broadway's own history as a village that grew from a coaching stop into a significant Cotswolds artistic and tourist destination.
Ashmolean Loan Collections
Paintings, furniture and decorative objects on long-term loan from the Ashmolean Museum's founding 1683 collections.
📍 First and second floor
Broadway: Village and Collectors
The history of Broadway village alongside the Keil furniture collection and local ceramics.
📍 Ground floor
Themes
Time Periods
Current Exhibitions
No current exhibitions. Please check the museum website for updates.