Garden Museum

The museum is run as an independent registered charity[6] and does not receive government funding, instead depending on Friends, Patrons and charitable trusts, in addition to income from admission and events.

In 2002, its 25th anniversary year, the museum launched a campaign to raise at least £600,000 to pay for a general overhaul of its facilities.

The redeveloped museum re-opened in 2017 with more galleries and spaces for education and events inserted into the historic interior in a second, award-winning design by Dow Jones Architects.

[10] At the core of the project was an aspiration to create the country's first archive of garden and landscape design which is open to the public on appointment.

[14] The first church on the site was built before the Norman Conquest, and was integral to the religious centre established by the Archbishops of Canterbury in the 12th century.

In 1062, a wooden church was built on the site by Goda, sister of Edward the Confessor; the Domesday Book of 1086 records 29 tenancies in her manor.

The body of the church was continually rebuilt and enriched over the centuries but, decisively, in 1851–1852 the aisles and nave were rebuilt by Philip Charles Hardwick, an architect prominent in the construction of banks and railway stations but not considered to be in the "first rank" of his generation; his father, Sir Philip Hardwick, designed the Euston Arch.

In 1976, Rosemary Nicholson visited the site to see the tomb of John Tradescant and was shocked to discover the church boarded up in readiness for its demolition.

The trust's rescue and repair of the structure became one of the great architectural conservation causes of its time, and the church became a museum.

[15] Elias Ashmole (instrumental in the development of speculative freemasonry and founder of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford)[16] was buried in the church in 1692.

Burials outside in the churchyard include John Sealy of the Coade Stone Manufactory and Vice-Admiral Bligh of HMS Bounty fame.

[17] The original 17th-century design for the tomb is in the Pepys Library, Cambridge, and an image of it may also be found at the National Portrait Gallery.

[20] These included: Richard Bancroft (who oversaw the production of the King James Bible), John Moore, Frederick Cornwallis, Matthew Hutton and Thomas Tenison.