Given to a city in 1944. Given a room in 1983. I have still not given it a day.
William Burrell was a Glasgow shipowner who bought his first picture at fifteen and went on buying for something like seventy-five years. In 1944 he and Constance, Lady Burrell, gave the whole of it to the city — around six thousand objects then, more than nine thousand by his death in 1958 — with conditions attached about where it could properly be housed. The collection waited. An international competition was eventually held, Barry Gasson, John Meunier and Brit Andresen won it, and the building opened in Pollok Country Park in 1983, thirty-nine years after the gift. That gap is the most interesting thing I know about the place, and I have not yet gone to see what it bought.
Everyone who writes about it writes about the same wall. The north gallery is a glass façade under angled timber beams, set down among the trees, so that the objects on their stone bases are read against a wood that changes through the day and through the year. The medieval stonework is not displayed so much as built in: a sixteenth-century sandstone portal from Hornby Castle in Yorkshire — the castle pulled down in 1930 — set into the courtyard wall, with the Warwick Vase standing in front of it. Three rooms from Hutton Castle, Burrell's own house, have been reassembled inside with their furnishings. The building, in other words, is claiming to be part of the collection. That is a large claim and it is the one I am going to test.
It closed in 2016 and reopened in March 2022 after a refurbishment costing something over sixty-eight million pounds; it took the Art Fund's Museum of the Year in 2023, which is the sort of endorsement that makes me suspicious and then makes me go. Entry is free. It is twenty minutes from the city centre by bus or a five-minute walk from Pollokshaws West. There is no excuse and there never has been. October, a weekday, the whole day — and I intend to walk up through the park rather than take the shuttle, because if the argument is that a collection belongs in a wood, then the wood is part of the visit.
The plates are held empty on purpose. I do not publish photographs of rooms I have not stood in.