Jonathan Morrison
Windermere Jetty Museum — Britain’s most beautiful boat shed
A remarkable collection of boats has found safe harbour in a new museum
Like death and taxes, rich people and boats seem strangely inseparable. Yet while Philip Green, Roman Abramovich and the like park their floating gin-palaces off Monaco nowadays, in the late 1800s the have-yachts escaped the have-nots on the waters of Lake Windermere in Cumbria. Much of what these Victorian plutocrats left as a legacy could, however, have been lost to history without a remarkable collection that began in 1977 as the pet project of a local builder, George Pattinson, and which until now has not had a worthy home.
It brought together vessels such as the Esperance, which inspired Captain Flint’s houseboat in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons and was built for the original Barrow boy, the steel magnate Henry Schneider, who commuted back to Barrow-in-Furness across Windermere, with the SL Dolly of 1850, believed to be one of the oldest mechanically powered boats in the world.
There are relics from the Britannia, perhaps the most luxurious liner to grace an inland waterway. There is Beatrix Potter’s tarn boat, which she used to sketch in; a 144mph catamaran from 1982; and, at the other end of the timeline, the Margaret, believed to be the oldest sailing boat in Britain, launched in 1780. Heck, there’s even an aquatic glider.
A diverse collection, then, and one that has been cleverly rehoused in a low-lying building split into fingers, reflecting the diverse activities it is required to accommodate. On one side, by the pier, is a sumptuous wood-panelled café for passing tourists; in the middle is an education centre, a working wet-dock and well-lit, flexible gallery spaces; and, singled out, a workshop for restoring and maintaining the many vessels that are still functional. It is quite obviously an enormous and enormously ambitious space, a rare living and working museum.
Yet it doesn’t seem that large from a distance. At first it looks most like an unassuming ensemble of sheds and wharves — perhaps not entirely elegant in themselves. There is certainly something industrial about the black copper cladding, intended to patinate and weather to green. The museum was, after all, built on a works site for gravel dredging and it also takes cues from the traditional dark boat sheds that dot the shoreline in this national park. The idea, though, is that the £20 million structure (made possible by a £13 million grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund) will fade into the hills behind and knit with the shadows and water, the raw bulk slowly vanishing like one of its steam launches into the mist
Have the architects Carmody Groarke — most famous for their 7 July Memorial in Hyde Park — really pushed the boat out? No, but that’s the genius of it. The museum puts the vistas so beloved of writers from Wordsworth to Potter centre-stage. The water streams from all sides, through big windows, pattering off necessarily substantial overhangs. In these parts it’s wise to let the weather and the landscape have the final say — and what a landscape.
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