Roche Court Sculpture Park and Gallery

About the early days of the London gallery, its founder remarked sixty years later: “The art world was very different when we started.

We managed to find a sponsor and a sandwich shop on Sloane Street, and we gutted it ourselves.”[2] A few years later, the gallery abandoned its initial non-profit idealism and continued on a commercial basis.

By that time the rent of the London property had become unaffordable and the gallery relocated to Roche Court, the Ponsonby's early 19th-century country house in Wiltshire, nine miles east of Salisbury.

Among the many artists that had exhibitions in the Roche Court galleries are Edmund de Waal, Matthew Hilton, Tom Dixon, Katie Walker, Eva Rothschild and Yinka Shonibare.

[1][2][3] When Madeleine Ponsonby moved the gallery to Wiltshire, she envisioned the seventy acres of gardens, woodlands and pastures, or at least part of it, turned into a huge sculpture park: “When I came here, there were no places, apart from the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, where artists could show big works outside.”[3] The park features sculptures by well-known British artists such as Barbara Hepworth, Anthony Caro, Kenneth Armitage, Julian Opie, Richard Long, Barry Flanagan, Michael Craig-Martin, Christopher Le Brun, Nigel Hall, Conrad Shawcross, Gavin Turk, Antony Gormley and Phyllida Barlow.

The trust also runs ARTiculation, a national competition that encourages young people to engage in public speaking through art.