Past Projects

Trace Repton's career from its picturesque beginnings to the Gardenesque style which changed England’s relationship with nature forever

Looking at twelve selected trees, this half-day workshop will explore the lives of trees through a selection of their uses

This morning course will trip lightly through the biology of pistils, pastimes of pastoral poets and a plethora of amorous potions

Learn how The Society of Dilettanti influenced the Georgian landscape garden

This half-day session with Botanic Garden Director, Professor Beverley Glover, will explore the concept of colour in plants

Learn how, far from being a desert, Fenland is a biodiversity hotspot that merits study and conservation

This course will explore the chemistry and botany of the main edible plant families that contribute fruits and vegetables to the human diet

Taking inspiration from horticulture, history and literature we will explore how gardens and plants can be a "fatal attraction"

Come on a journey to far flung places to find out where our familiar and not so familiar spices come from

Take your hand sewing skills further with this traditional Dresden plate ‘chrysanthemum’ block

Join Kettle’s Yard, The Heong Gallery and The Fitzwilliam Museum for a live streamed drawing and sound performance by Syrian-born and Cambridge-based artist Issam Kourbaj, marking the tenth anniversary of the Syrian uprising – a crisis that resulted in violent armed conflict and ongoing civil war. This is a collaboration with composer Richard Causton and soprano Jessica Summers.

oin Andrew Smith, one of our long-serving Visitor Assistants and our resident furniture enthusiast, for a talk on the often-overlooked pieces of furniture and hidden objects in the Kettle’s Yard House. The talk will look at some of the fascinating stories behind these pieces and why they are so important to Kettle’s Yard.

£15 (£12 Friends, £5 Students), booking required

Click here to book now

Join us on 29 April, 13 May and 3 June for a three day online event series.

How and why does classical antiquity live on in us and in our worlds? Join Lesley Saunders and Josephine Balmer for a poetry reading in this Cambridge Festival event.

The Museum of Classical Archaeology is home to more than 600 historical plaster casts. Join Curator Dr Susanne Turner on this virtual tour.

Do you know how colourful the ancient world was? In this activity for Cambridge Festival, we'll show you how to draw a simplified Ancient Greek Temple and decorate it.

An opportunity to ask us your gardening questions and find out what we're up to in our veg garden!

Join us for a three-way online conversation with specialists in Manuscripts and Printed Books as they reflect on the importance of touch in the making and conserving of medieval manuscripts, and how medieval readers themselves left traces – devout and destructive - of their touch.

Join the Friends of Kettle’s Yard and Phil Neale, one of our Visitor Assistants and Chair of the T.E. Lawrence Society, for an online talk on the friendship and correspondence between Jim Ede and T.E. Lawrence, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, and their mutual interest in art and literature, as well as their memories of India.

In this online talk Dr Amy Tobin, curator of Exhibitions, Research and Events at Kettle’s Yard explores gender, art making, performance and desire in the works by three women artists featured in The Human Touch exhibition: Alexis Hunter, Ketty La Rocca and Geta Bratescu.

An exhibition of works by the artist Alfred Wallis.

Kettle’s Yard is pleased to present Untitled: art on the conditions of our time. This exhibition brings together work by 10 British African diaspora artists with a focus on how their innovative practices ask important questions about some of the most important cultural and political issues of our turbulent times. 

Join us for an online discussion of the Anatomies of Touch with a specially invited panel:

Psychologist and broadcaster Claudia Hammond, hand surgeon James Hopkinson-Woolley, and artist Jane Dixon. The event will be chaired by Suzanne Reynolds and Elenor Ling, Co-Curators of 'The Human Touch'.

As part of our monthly Family First events we have online activities you can join in with whilst the Museum is closed. For May, join our learning team to make a door hanging inspired by the protective scarab beetle in our ancient Egyptian collection.

A free, online interactive session is for babies under 12 months and their carers.

Touch is our first sense. Through touch we make art, stake a claim to what we own and those we love, express our faith, our belief, our anger. Touch is how we leave our mark and find our place in the world; touch is how we connect.

Drawing on works of art spanning four thousand years and from across the globe, this exhibition explores the fundamental role of touch in human experience, and offers new ways of looking.

Plants have been used in the beauty and fragrance industry for thousands of years, from ancient times up until the present day. This exhibition features a range of works from our exceptional botanical collection, including watercolours, perfume vessels and scent bottles.

Join us for an online conversation exploring the life and work of Alfred Wallis, inspired by our current exhibition Alfred Wallis Rediscovered.

Join art critic Martin Gayford for a talk on his new book 'Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy' 

Join us for the Zoology Live! Online Festival 2021. We have three fantastic livestreams lined up for you, broadcast live from the Museum of Zoology, including dissecting a cowpat!! Don't miss it! 

Join art historian Sarah Burles for an online afternoon talk on the artist Winifred Nicholson (1893-1981). The talk will put Nicholson’s work at Kettle’s Yard into a wider context as well as discussing her friendship with Jim and Helen Ede.

The Garden will be open late on Thursday evenings in June and July

Join us on a journey of DNA discovery

We are delighted to partner with the International Garden Photographer of the Year (IGPOTY) to offer a new free-to-enter special competition

Edmund de Waal in conversation with Richard Calvocoressi.

The creativity of the artist’s hands and the marks and traces they leave is part of the narrative of the Fitzwilliam’s The Human Touch exhibition. Edmund de Waal has also been exploring the role of touch and the iconography of the hand in Henry Moore’s art in This Living Hand, an exhibition now showing at the Henry Moore Foundation at Perry Green in Hertfordshire.

Join our Assistant Curator, Dr Ángela Cano, on this course over two mornings, journeying through the many dimensions of tropical plant diversity.

Join double RHS gold-medal winning artist Janie Pirie for this intermediate tutorial

Right plant, right place… we’ve all heard that before right? But what does it mean and how can we achieve it in our own gardens?