Snowshill Manor & Garden
A house near Broadway filled room by room with one man's most extraordinary collection of objects in England.
A house near Broadway filled room by room with one man's most extraordinary collection of objects in England.
Charles Paget Wade spent a lifetime gathering things: suits of Japanese samurai armour, old bicycles, model ships, weaving tools, musical instruments, clocks that no longer keep time. He packed more than twenty thousand objects into every room of this honey-coloured Tudor manor until there was barely space to turn around, then moved himself into the small Priest's House in the garden so the collection could have the house to itself. The National Trust took it on in 1951, and mercifully they have kept it much as Wade left it. There are no tidy museum labels or roped-off corridors here. You wander from room to room as if you have stumbled into a very well-organised attic belonging to someone who found everything in the world interesting. It is one of the strangest and most memorable places we take people when they come to stay, and it sits about forty minutes from the cottage, up near Broadway on the Gloucestershire edge of the Cotswolds.
We tend to treat Snowshill as a proper half-day out rather than a quick stop. The manor is deliberately dim inside, lit low to protect the collection, so your eyes take a moment to adjust and then keep finding things: a cabinet of clocks, a wall of masks, a whole room given over to the samurai. Children love it because there is always something new to spot in every corner, and adults love it for exactly the same reason. Give yourselves time to slow down, because rushing rather misses the point of a house built entirely on curiosity.
Snowshill is a National Trust property, so members go in free and everyone else buys a ticket at reception. A few practical things are worth knowing so the day runs smoothly.
The terraced garden deserves time of its own. Wade laid it out with the architect M. H. Baillie Scott in the early 1920s as a series of Arts and Crafts outdoor rooms, layering ponds, borders and quiet stone seats into the hillside so the garden reads as an extension of the house. On a warm afternoon the views across the valley are lovely, and the whole place has a stillness that feels hard-won in this corner of the Cotswolds, where the coaches tend to cluster around the bigger names. Snowshill sits just far enough off the main road to feel like a secret. The village itself is tiny, barely more than a handful of cottages, and the lane down to the manor winds through fields where you half expect nothing to have changed since Wade first arrived.
Snowshill pairs naturally with the other great gardens on this side of the Cotswolds. Hidcote and neighbouring Kiftsgate Court Gardens are about twenty minutes on, and Batsford Arboretum is a gentler, tree-filled alternative fifteen minutes away. Broadway itself is close by for lunch or a wander, and if you would rather see the full spread of options, our guide to things to do in the area runs from grand houses to quiet garden days like this one.
“It's the most wonderfully strange house in the Cotswolds. Every room feels like opening a different chapter of someone's brilliant, slightly unhinged imagination.”
All of this on the doorstep, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.