Harry's Mini Museum

A new micro-museum honours an innovative garden designer who played a key role in one of art’s great 20th century creations, writes Mike Glover

- Mike Glover

At just 4.3 by 3.2 metres, it could be the smallest museum in England. The micro-museum is dedicated to garden designer Harry Pierce and is located in the reconstruction of his drawing office on the Cylinders Estate at Elterwater in Langdale.

It will be officially opened during Heritage Open week, on Sunday September 15, in a ceremony attended by Mr Pierce’s family and guests prominent in the landscape architecture movement.

The micro-museum contains a desk, drawings, books and plans Mr Pierce drew up to convert the Cylinders Estate from its industrial past as part of a gunpowder works into experimental gardens.

The office is where Mr Pierce met German-born artist Kurt Schwitters. The couple became close friends and Pierce rented a barn on the site for Schwitters to use as a studio to resume his life-long attempts to create an installation in his own Merz style.

Schwitters completed one wall of The Merz Barn before his death in January 1948. Nearly 20 years later it was lifted and moved to the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle Upon Tyne where it is still on view.

It has been valued at £15 million, although it is considered priceless as the only remaining example of Schwitters’s installations. Previous examples in Hanover and Norway were destroyed.