New Allen Gallery

The gallery began life as a stable and coachman's house attached to William Curtis's own home next door, the same Curtis whose collecting founded the museum still standing beside it. It opened to the public in 1963, then expanded in 1979 thanks to a bequest from the estate of W. H. Allen, a Hampshire landscape painter who left his life's work to the town and gave the gallery his name. What grew inside is genuinely remarkable: around 3,000 pieces of ceramics spanning 1250 to the present day, from everyday English Delftware to studio pottery by Lucie Rie, alongside Wedgwood and an internationally important collection of tin-glazed earthenware. 

A major redevelopment, backed by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and the local community, reworked the building around that collection: galleries designed to show the ceramics properly, a dedicated space for Allen's own paintings, a study room for serious researchers, and a courtyard that connects the building to its garden. Today the gallery feels like a genuine community hub, allowing this already admired collection to be shared with even more people. 

That community feel is nowhere clearer than the café, shaped with the garden in mind rather than as an afterthought. Order a coffee, find a seat looking out over the same quiet grounds that have surrounded this building for generations — a sundial mounted on a baluster salvaged from the old London Bridge, a bronze of two dancing girls — and simply sit with it a while before continuing your journey through the gallery. 

Come and see a genuinely important collection in a setting that allows it to shine, then let the café and garden talk you into staying a little longer than you planned.