The story
William Burrell made his fortune in Glasgow shipping, buying vessels cheap in slumps and selling in booms, and he spent much of it on art. In 1944 he gave the whole hoard, some 9,000 objects, to the city of Glasgow, with firm conditions about how it should be housed.
Meeting those conditions took decades. The purpose-built museum finally opened in 1983 in Pollok Country Park, a low glass-and-timber building set among trees, so that medieval stone doorways and stained glass are seen against real woodland outside. It reopened in 2022 after a long refurbishment.
Burrell collected widely, medieval tapestries and stained glass, Chinese bronzes and ceramics, and paintings including several by Degas. Whole architectural fragments are built into the walls, among them the carved stone portal of Hornby Castle, so you walk through the collection rather than just past it.
