About
The Elizabethan House Museum on New Street in Plymouth's historic Barbican district is one of the oldest intact domestic buildings in the city — a surviving fragment of the Tudor and Elizabethan town that sent adventurers, explorers, and colonists out across the Atlantic and beyond. Built around the late sixteenth century as a prosperous merchant's town house, the building escaped the wartime bombing that destroyed much of old Plymouth and now stands as a rare and tangible connection to the city at the height of its Elizabethan maritime power.
New Street and the surrounding Barbican area retain much of their Elizabethan and Jacobean character, with cobbled lanes, jetted timber-framed buildings, and warehouses that speak to Plymouth's role as a major port and commercial centre in the age of exploration and trade. It was from Plymouth's harbour, within sight of the Elizabethan House, that Sir Francis Drake set out on his circumnavigation of the globe in 1577, and it was from Plymouth Hoe and the Barbican that the fleet assembled to repel the Spanish Armada in 1588. Most famously of all, it was from the Barbican quayside in September 1620 that the Pilgrim Fathers departed on the Mayflower on their voyage to the New World — an event that shaped the history of two continents.
The museum presents the house as a window into the domestic life of a prosperous Elizabethan merchant and his household. The rooms are furnished and interpreted to show how different spaces were used in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries — the hall as the main living and receiving space, the parlour for private family use, the kitchen for food preparation, and the sleeping chambers above. The furnishings include period-appropriate oak furniture, pewter and earthenware vessels, textile hangings, and domestic objects that recreate the atmosphere of a comfortable merchant household of the period.
The house provides an intimate and tactile encounter with the Elizabethan world that is qualitatively different from the experience offered by larger museums. The low ceilings, narrow stairs, small windows, and creaking floorboards are authentic features of the building rather than reconstructed elements, and the sense of being inside a genuinely old structure — rather than a reproduction of one — gives the visit a particular quality of historical immediacy.
The Elizabethan House is managed by Plymouth City Museums and Art Gallery and forms part of the network of historic sites and museums that together tell the story of Plymouth's extraordinary contribution to British and world history. It is particularly popular with families, school groups, and visitors with an interest in Tudor history and the age of exploration.
Categories:
Highlights
A Genuine Elizabethan Merchant's House
The Elizabethan House Museum is not a reconstruction or a re-creation — it is a genuinely surviving sixteenth-century building, one of the oldest intact domestic structures in Plymouth, whose fabric embodies the craft, materials, and spatial organisation of the Elizabethan age. The thick walls, original timber framing, small mullioned windows, low ceilings, and narrow staircase are authentic features of a building designed and built before Shakespeare completed his first plays and before the Armada threatened England's coasts.
The survival of this building through four centuries of development, fire, and the wartime bombing that destroyed much of old Plymouth is a matter of great historical significance and good fortune.
The Barbican and the Age of Exploration
New Street and the surrounding Barbican area were at the heart of the most important port in Elizabethan England — the base from which Drake sailed around the world, from which Hawkins and Frobisher mounted expeditions to the Americas and the Arctic, and from which the English fleet set out to face the Spanish Armada.
The Elizabethan House was almost certainly home to a merchant whose wealth and activities were bound up in this maritime world — importing and exporting goods, provisioning ships, financing voyages, and participating in the commercial networks that made Plymouth one of the wealthiest towns in Tudor England.
A visit to the house is inseparable from the history of the streets around it.
The Mayflower Connection
In September 1620, a small ship called the Mayflower departed from the Barbican quayside in Plymouth carrying 102 Pilgrim Fathers, Separatist Puritans seeking religious freedom in the New World. Their departure point — now marked by the Mayflower Steps a short walk from the Elizabethan House — is one of the most historically significant locations in the English-speaking world.
The Elizabethan House, standing today as it stood in 1620, provides an authentic physical connection to the world the Pilgrim Fathers left behind and helps visitors understand the Plymouth from which they chose to depart for an uncertain future across the Atlantic.
Period-Furnished Tudor Rooms
The rooms of the Elizabethan House have been furnished with objects appropriate to a prosperous merchant household of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries — oak furniture of the period, pewter and earthenware vessels, textile hangings, iron cooking implements, and the personal objects that would have populated the spaces of everyday domestic life.
The arrangement reflects the function of each room: the hall as the main shared living space, the parlour for private family use, the kitchen for food preparation, and the chambers above as sleeping accommodation. The combination of authentic architectural space and period-appropriate furnishings creates an immersive encounter with the domestic world of Elizabethan England.
Collections
A Merchant's Home in Elizabethan Plymouth
The period-furnished rooms of the house, presenting domestic life in a late sixteenth-century Plymouth merchant's household through authentic furnishings, household objects, and interpretive panels explaining the history of the building and its Barbican setting.
Current Exhibitions
Contextual display connecting the Elizabethan House to the wider history of the Barbican, the age of exploration, and the departure of the Pilgrim Fathers from Plymouth in 1620.