About
The Gibberd Gallery is the indoor home of one of the most improbable art collections in Britain. Harlow was designated a new town in 1947 and master-planned by the architect Sir Frederick Gibberd, who believed — and persuaded others — that sculpture belonged in the ordinary streets of a working town rather than only in metropolitan galleries. The Harlow Art Trust was founded in 1953 to buy and site it, and it has been doing so ever since. Something approaching a hundred sculptures now stand in Harlow's squares, estates, underpasses, parks and schools, by artists including Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Elisabeth Frink, Ralph Brown and Auguste Rodin, and in 2010 the town declared itself the world's first Sculpture Town.
The gallery occupies a mezzanine within Harlow's Civic Centre, overlooking Henry Moore's bronze Family Group — the work that began the whole enterprise and remains its emblem. Inside, the permanent holding is the Sir Frederick Gibberd Watercolour Collection, the body of British watercolours the architect assembled across his lifetime and left to the town, shown in rotation. Around it runs a year-round programme of temporary exhibitions, including Harlow Open, the annual open submission show for artists from Harlow and the surrounding districts of Essex and Hertfordshire.
What makes a visit worthwhile is the relationship between the room and the town outside it. Hepworth's Contrapuntal Forms was carved for the Festival of Britain in 1951 and given to Harlow two years later; Rodin's Eve stands in a shopping precinct; Frink's Boar sits where people walk past it with carrier bags. The gallery is where visitors get their bearings before going out to find them, and the Trust publishes trails for exactly that purpose. It is worth saying plainly that most of the collection is not indoors: this is a gallery attached to a town-sized sculpture park.
Admission is free and the gallery opens six days a week through the middle of the day, which makes it easy to combine with a walking tour of the sculptures. Exhibition events, workshops and guided tours are usually bookable in advance. Gibberd's own house and garden at Marsh Lane, filled with more sculpture and open under separate arrangements, completes the picture of a designer who took the idea of art in daily life entirely seriously.
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Plan Your Visit
⏱️ Recommended Visit Duration
💡 Visitor Tips
- Most of the collection is outdoors. Treat the gallery as the starting point, pick up the sculpture trail information, and allow an afternoon for walking the town.
- The gallery is closed on Sundays and opens only between 11:00 and 16:00, so plan around a middle-of-the-day visit.
- Check the current exhibition listing before travelling — some shows run on a shorter weekly pattern than the gallery's standard hours.
- Exhibitions, events, workshops and tours must be booked in advance; the free walk-in visit covers the gallery itself.
- The gallery overlooks Henry Moore's Family Group in the Civic Centre — look down over the balcony before you look at the walls.
- Harlow Town station is about twenty minutes' walk and has direct trains from London Liverpool Street, making a car unnecessary.
- The Gibberd Garden at Marsh Lane, the architect's own house and sculpture garden, opens under separate arrangements and is well worth a second half-day.
- Everything in the collection, indoors and out, is free to see — an unusual thing to be able to say about Moore, Hepworth, Frink and Rodin in one town.
Highlights
Henry Moore's Family Group
Moore's bronze Family Group is the founding work of the Harlow collection and stands beneath the gallery's mezzanine in the Civic Centre, where the gallery looks directly down on it. Made in the mid-1950s, it belongs to the group of works in which Moore returned repeatedly to the seated family as a subject, and its arrival in a brand-new town built for families rehoused out of bombed east London was an entirely deliberate statement about what public art was for.
Seeing it in a civic building that ordinary people walk through on council business is exactly the point.
The Sir Frederick Gibberd Watercolour Collection
Gibberd assembled a substantial collection of British watercolours across his working life and left it to the town he had planned, and it forms the gallery's permanent holding, shown in rotation alongside the temporary programme. The collection reflects an architect's eye — an interest in structure, light and landscape rather than in fashionable names — and it provides an unusually direct insight into the taste of the man responsible for Harlow's plan, Liverpool's Metropolitan Cathedral and the first Heathrow terminals.
Barbara Hepworth's Contrapuntal Forms
Hepworth carved Contrapuntal Forms in blue limestone for the Festival of Britain in 1951, where it stood on the South Bank as one of the festival's signature commissions. Two years later it was given to Harlow, and it has stood in the town ever since. That a major Hepworth left the Festival for a new town in Essex rather than a national museum is a genuinely startling fact, and it says a great deal about the ambitions of both the Festival and the Harlow Art Trust in the years immediately after the war.
Rodin's Eve
A bronze cast of Rodin's Eve, a figure conceived in the 1880s in connection with the Gates of Hell, stands in Harlow among the shops — a nineteenth-century French masterwork placed where people pass it carrying shopping. Its acquisition by the Art Trust was an early and confident statement that a new town's collection need not be confined to contemporary British work, and it remains one of the more surprising things a visitor to Harlow encounters.
The gallery holds the story of how it came here.
Collections
The Harlow Art Trust holds and cares for the town's public art collection, comprising something approaching a hundred sculptures sited across Harlow's town centre, neighbourhoods, parks, estates and schools, by artists including Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Auguste Rodin, Elisabeth Frink, Ralph Brown, Gerda Rubinstein, Malcolm Woodward, Sally Doig and Jane Ackroyd, together with more recent commissions.
Indoors, the Gibberd Gallery holds the Sir Frederick Gibberd Watercolour Collection, the architect's personal collection of British watercolours bequeathed to the town and shown in rotation, alongside sculptures on permanent indoor display. The gallery also mounts a continuous programme of temporary exhibitions, including the annual Harlow Open submission show, and maintains documentation, trail material and archival records relating to the acquisition and siting of the collection since the Trust's foundation in 1953.
The Gibberd Watercolour Collection
Rotating displays from Sir Frederick Gibberd's personal collection of British watercolours, bequeathed to Harlow by the architect who master-planned the town.
Harlow Sculpture Town
Permanent indoor sculptures at the gallery and Civic Centre, including Henry Moore's Family Group, together with trail information for the roughly one hundred works sited across the town.
Themes
Time Periods
Current Exhibitions
No current exhibitions. Please check the museum website for updates.