This week we look at the finalists for the Art Fund Museum of the Year award, the winner of which will be announced on 26th June. They are a diverse mix but have an interesting - unofficial - connecting theme in that they are all in repurposed buildings. This sort of adaptive reuse is slowly gathering pace in the UK and, given the shockingly high number of good but empty buildings, the potential is enormous. The Golden Thread Gallery on Queen Street in Belfast is in the former 1930s Corporation Gas Showroom.

Finally, when visiting Beverley one cannot but think of Winifred Holtby who was born in Rudston twenty miles to the north. She was deeply connected to the Yorkshire Wolds and often used elements of Beverley and Hull in her novels. The plaque on the  former County Hall on Cross Street in Beverley explains that it is the model for the County Hall in South Riding (1936, a clever title, as there have only ever been three Yorkshire 'ridings' or 'thirdings': North, East and West). We publish The Crowded Street which is set in small-town 'Marshington', another of her East Yorkshire locations.

The best guide to the architecture of Beverley is still Nikolaus Pevsner. His original Yorkshire: York and the East Riding was published in 1972, but this was revised and expanded in 1995. It may be rather dry and terse, but the  "perambulations" enable the visitor to appreciate the great concentration of excellent medieval, Georgian and Victorian buildings in this relatively small and unspoilt town. These are Ann Routh's almshouses (c1749) built for the "maintenance of 12 poor old women". 

In 1914, Fred Elwell married Mary (1874-1952), a talented and distinguished artist who had moved to Beverley with her first husband, a prosperous Hull oil broker. Mary is known for her townscapes and domestic interiors painted in a more luminous style than Fred's brilliantly detailed, more formal approach. The town has installed twenty-four framed pictures by both around the town - this is  Beverley Minster from the Friary (1934, Beverley Art Gallery) by Mary - and there is a map with all the locations which all make for a very enjoyable art trail.

Beverley is where artist Fred Elwell (1870-1958) was born and spent most of his life, painting many local scenes and people. He was a well-known figure in the town, had a studio at 22 Trinity Lane, and lived at Bar House. Beverley Art Gallery has the largest collection of his work including this marvellous painting, Birthday Party (1936). Fred Elwell RA: A Life in Art (2014) is the best book on the subject.  

A trip to Beverley in East Yorkshire has inspired us in many ways. It is a beautiful small market town with not only a spectacular Minster but also a stunning late medieval parish church. In 2022, St Mary's installed on the exterior nine stone carvings of heads of "women of influence" including aviator Amy Johnson (above, before installation) who grew up in nearby Hull, and Mary Wollstonecraft who spent part of her childhood in Beverley.

Valerie Finnis created a huge library of plant portraits, having learned about photography in the mid-1950s from Wilhelm Schacht, the Curator of the Munich Botanical Garden. He gave her a second-hand Rolleiflex camera, which she used for decades. Today, she is also remembered for her portraits of contemporary gardeners, often dressed in grand or eccentric outfits. Subjects included Margery Fish, Vita Sackville-West, Rhoda, Lady Birley, and Nancy Lancaster (above).