8 Exhibitions in UK Stately Homes to See This Summer

These days, the UK’s stately homes are places to see contemporary art, often in the great outdoors. This year sees the opening of two important new venues: Goodwood Art Foundation in Sussex and Wolterton Hall in Norfolk, who join the likes of Derbyshire’s Chatsworth House and Compton Verney in Warwickshire. Over the next few months, these houses and estates offer a remarkable range of international artists in some of the country’s most romantic and evocative settings.

Maggi Hambling and Ro Robertson, ‘Sea State’ | Wolterton Hall, Norfolk | Until 7 December 2025

Norfolk’s Wolterton Hall was founded by the influential Walpole family (Robert was Britain’s first prime minister; Horace built Strawberry Hill and invented the English gothic novel). Following several fires and restorations, this important estate has reopened to visitors and has an accompanying arts and culture programme. The inaugural exhibition, ‘Sea State’, features new work by Maggi Hambling and Ro Robertson and is co-curated by Simon Oldfield and Gemma Rolls-Bentley. The site-specific presentation responds to the house’s proximity to the North Norfolk coast, and the endless mutation of the sea, its historial role in empire and its metaphorical resonances for the queer body.

Wolterton Hall, Norfolk, NR11 7LY.

Rachel Whiteread | Goodwood Art Foundation, West Sussex | Until 2 November 2025

Launched this summer, Goodwood Art Foundation is a new not-for-profit on the South Downs in West Sussex devoted to contemporary art. As well as a gallery space, it situates works throughout a carefully landscaped environment, like an updated version of an 18th-century estate. Alongside outdoor works by Isamu Noguchi, Hélio Oiticica, Susan Phillipsz, Veronica Ryan and Rose Wylie, there is a film installation by New Yorker Amie Siegel in the Pigott Gallery, while the first season’s headliner is Rachel Whiteread. Whiteread is showing recent sculptural pieces and rarely seen photographs indoors, and several cast concrete works set within the landscape, including Pair (1999) and Detached II (2012). There is also a brand new large outdoor work, Down and Up.

Goodwood Art Foundation, New Barn Hill, Chichester, West Sussex, PO18 0QP. 

‘The Gorgeous Nothings’ | Chatsworth House, Derbyshire | Until 5 October 2025

‘The Gorgeous Nothings’ at Derbyshire’s Chatsworth House celebrates flowers through historical and contemporary work from the Devonshire Collections, loans from national and international museums, and new commissions from artists including Kapwani Kiwanga and Elliot Hundley. As the seat of the Duke of Devonshire, Chatsworth was a pioneering estate both in art collecting and the landscaping movement of the 18th century. Inspired by this, ‘The Gorgeous Nothings’ reflects not just flora, but the generations of landscape designers, gardeners, engineers and scientists who have had a hand in altering ‘nature’ at Chatsworth to reflect changing tastes and outside influences.

Chatsworth House, Bakewell, Derbyshire, DE45 1PP.

Pablo Bronstein, ‘The Temple of Solomon and Its Contents’ | Waddeson Manor, Buckinghamshire | Until 2 November 2025

Waddesdon Manor is a striking, French-chateau-style stately home that was a weekend retreat and ‘party house’ of the Rothschild family through the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It also housed Baron de Rothschild’s huge collection of objets d’art, much of which was eventually bequeathed to the British Museum. In this exhibition, Pablo Bronstein responds to Waddesdon both as a treasure house and as a British Jewish stately home. ‘The Temple of Solomon and Its Contents’ features imaginary plans and depictions of the mythic Biblical temple, famed for its lavishness of decoration and inconceivable riches, alongside pieces from the Rothschild collection, including unique 18th-century Jewish Italian embroidered hangings that depict both the Temple of Solomon and the Second Temple.

Waddesdon Manor, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, HP18 0JH.

‘Sculpture in the Park’ | Compton Verney, Warwickshire | Until 28 September 2025

Another estate that bears the imprint of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, Compton Verney opened a new rolling sculpture display across 120 impressively landscaped acres last year. Rather than chiming with their surroundings, though, the artists in ‘Sculpture in the Park’ seem to stand in stark contrast to its faux-naturalism, allowing their work to be seen in a radical awnd challenging context. Pieces by Larry Achiampong, Nic Deshayes, Hew Locke, Sarah Lucas (Perceval [2006], her only piece of public sculpture) and Augustas Serapinas follow landmark works by Louise Bourgeois and Helen Chadwick in this bold gesture to art en plein air. 

Compton Verney, Warwickshire, CV35 9HZ.

Linder, A kind of glamour about me | Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute, Scotland | Until 31 August 2025

Following its highly acclaimed run at London’s Hayward Gallery, ‘Linder: Danger Came Smiling’ is touring to Edinburgh this summer. To accompany it, Edinburgh Art Festival and Mount Stuart Trust have co-commissioned a new performance work by the artist. A kind of glamour about me, whose title quotes Sir Walter Scott, explores the creative process of art-making and identity-fashioning, with Linder collaborating with choreographer Holly Blakey, composer Maxwell Sterling and fashion designer Ashish Gupta. Experienced in the setting of Mount Stuart’s high-Victorian gothic madness, it should be quite a spectacle.

Mount Stuart, Rothesay, Isle of Bute, Scotland, PA20 9LR.

Prem Sahib, ‘Doubles’ | Pitzhanger Manor, London | 26 June – 21 September 2025

As Sir John Soane’s second home on the outskirts of London, Pitzhanger Manor is an apt location for an exhibition devoted to duplication. In ‘Doubles’, Prem Sahib explores copies and replicas, performance, mimicry, memory and duplicity. Sahib draws on Soane’s many casts of objects and his innovative use of mirrors in interventions that destabilize how spaces might be read. ‘Doubles’ also considers the relationship between inside and outside, with a major new bronze sculpture sited in the gardens that mirrors a counterpart, Apotropaic 1 (2023), within the house. Other works include an architectural rendering of a window from a public toilet that once stood in nearby Walpole Park and an installation of material from the archive of Sahib’s uncle, a race equality campaigner during the 1980s in Southall. Sahib has previously used lockers salvaged from gay sauna Chariots and a speech by Suella Braverman in his work, and ‘Doubles’ is another compelling and smart chapter from the artist.  Alongside Sahib’s work is an exhibition by Permindar Kaur, whose work has also been commissioned for Compton Verney.

Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery, Ealing Green, London, W5 5EQ.

‘Henry VIII’s Lost Ottoman Dagger’ | Strawberry Hill House, Twickenham | 27 September – 12 January 2026

On the outskirts of London, Strawberry Hill House was the vision of novelist, politician and aesthete Horace Walpole, who from 1747 transformed a humble cottage into a sugary, neo-gothic confection of battlements, finials and fan vaulting. In its Robert Adam interior, Walpole kept his collection of Reynolds portraits, Elizabethan miniatures and ancient Greek vases. The house provides a suitably theatrical setting for ‘Henry VIII’s Lost Ottoman Dagger’, a focused exhibition examining the history of a jewel-encrusted 16th century weapon once owned by Walpole, then acquired by the famous thespian Charles Kean. It includes important loans from the Portland Collection at Welbeck Abbey and an Ottoman dagger, once belonging to Rudolf II, from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

Strawberry Hill House, Twickenham, London, TW1 4ST

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^{Main image: Sarah Lucas, Perceval, 2006, in ‘Sculpture in the Park’. Photo: Jamie Woodley © Compton Verney}