Red Lodge Museum Bristol: Free Entry, Hours and the Tudor Oak Room

The Red Lodge Museum on Park Row is free to visit, open Saturday to Tuesday from 11am to 4pm, and closed Wednesday to Friday as well as over winter (roughly mid-December to the start of April). It holds the Great Oak Room, one of only three surviving Tudor interiors in Bristol and the oldest domestic room in the city still largely in its original state, plus a recreated Elizabethan knot garden outside.

What it actually is

The Red Lodge was built around 1580 as the lodge house to a much larger mansion for Sir John Younge, a wealthy Bristol merchant, on land that had previously been a Carmelite friary. The main mansion is long gone, but the lodge survives, and its showpiece is the Great Oak Room: carved oak panelling, an elaborate plaster ceiling and a striking two-tier fireplace, with the Younge family's coat of arms carved above the entrance. It's one of the best-preserved Elizabethan rooms anywhere in the West of England, and because it's free to visit, it's one of Bristol's most underrated stops for anyone interested in Tudor history.

Outside, the museum has recreated a small Elizabethan-style knot garden, based on the formal, geometric herb gardens that would have surrounded a house like this in the 16th century, worth a quick look if you're there when it's in bloom.

From Tudor mansion to Victorian reform school

The Red Lodge's second life is just as notable as its first. In 1854, the poet Lord Byron's widow, Anne Isabella Byron, bought the house and gave it to social reformer Mary Carpenter to run as a girls' reformatory school, one of the first of its kind in the country. Carpenter, who was also active in the anti-slavery and women's suffrage movements, used the Red Lodge to house and educate some of Bristol's poorest and most vulnerable girls until the school closed in 1917. A room in the museum is dedicated to this chapter of the building's history, alongside the Tudor rooms, so a visit covers two very different periods of Bristol's social history in one small building.

What's inside

• The Great Oak Room: The main event, with its original Elizabethan panelling, plaster ceiling and double-height fireplace.
• Period rooms: Several smaller rooms dressed to show the building's later domestic use.
• Mary Carpenter room: Telling the story of the girls' reformatory school that operated here for over 60 years.
• The knot garden: A small recreated Elizabethan garden just outside the house.

Like the Georgian House, there's no fixed route and usually a volunteer steward on hand if you have questions.

Practical details

It's a small museum, so most visitors combine it with something else nearby rather than making it the whole trip.

Getting there and what to combine it with

Park Row runs between the city centre and Clifton, close to the University of Bristol's main campus. The Red Lodge is a five-minute walk from the Georgian House Museum on Great George Street, Bristol's other free historic house, and most people visit both on the same trip since they're free, small, and genuinely complementary: one Tudor, one Georgian. It's also close to Bristol Museum & Art Gallery and the climb up to Cabot Tower on Brandon Hill for a view over the city afterwards.

There's no dedicated parking at the museum; see our Bristol city centre parking guide if you're driving, or walk up from the Harbourside or Clifton if you're already nearby.

Georgian House vs Red Lodge

Both are free, both keep the same Saturday-to-Tuesday, 11am-4pm hours, and both close over winter, so you can realistically do both in a single afternoon.