Sarah Myerscough Gallery’s New Home Was Built to Educate a Parish. Now It Is Built to Educate Collectors

ART & CULTURE · LONDON

Reading time: 8 min

Sarah Myerscough Gallery has moved into a Victorian Gothic building on Balderton Street that spent a decade empty before its restoration by CarverHaggard and the specialist contractor EC1. The building was designed in the 1870s to teach and support a Mayfair parish. It now houses a gallery built on craft, and a new foundation built specifically to teach it.

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Introduction

Sarah Myerscough Gallery reopened in October 2025 in a building that has been almost exactly this kind of thing before. The Schoolhouse, at 18 Balderton Street in Mayfair, was designed in the 1870s to hold a parish reading room, a working-men’s club, a soup kitchen and a set of classrooms. It taught a Victorian congregation practical skills and gave them somewhere to gather. After a period as part of the old Polytechnic of Central London, it stood empty and derelict for roughly a decade before Myerscough found it.

She has spent more than twenty-five years building a gallery around the idea that craft deserves the same seriousness as fine art, representing artists who work in wood, ceramic, glass, textile and metal at fairs including TEFAF Maastricht, PAD London, FOG Design + Art San Francisco and Design Miami. The Schoolhouse is the first building she has owned outright rather than leased, and the basement now holds the Crafted Arts Foundation, a new charitable initiative built specifically to address what she has called a lack of craft education. A building put up to teach a parish has been restored to teach a new generation of makers. Nobody covering the move has set those two facts against each other, but the building’s second life is arguably arguing the same case as its first.

A parish institute built to do more than hold services

The Schoolhouse was designed in the 1870s by the architect R. J. Withers as a parochial institute serving the congregation of St Mark’s, the parish church a short walk away in North Audley Street. It was not primarily a place of worship. The rear block held a soup kitchen, a church hall, a parish working-men’s club, a reading room, a library and a set of classrooms, the full civic apparatus a Victorian parish used to look after a population that needed feeding, teaching and somewhere warm to sit as much as it needed preaching to.

The building announces that mixed brief on its facade. Red brick, Gothic arches and oversized oriel windows face Balderton Street behind an unassuming entrance, with symmetrical arched openings marking the public rooms around a small courtyard. Inside, Withers gave the ground floor a five and a half metre ceiling, a height more usually reserved for a nave than a classroom, which is precisely why the space now reads so naturally as a gallery. What was built to hold a congregation now holds an audience.

Quality in obscurity: the architect who never sought a name

Robert Jewell Withers has had almost no popular reputation outside architectural history circles, which makes him an unusual choice to have shaped a building now getting this much attention. Born in Shepton Mallet, Somerset in 1824, he apprenticed under the church specialist Thomas Hellyer on the Isle of Wight from 1839, then set up his own practice in Sherborne, Dorset in 1848 before relocating to London in 1850. He kept offices in the Adelphi from 1854 and stayed there for the rest of his career.

Withers built roughly a hundred churches over his working life, the great majority of them rural commissions in Wales, Lincolnshire and the West Country rather than the London landmarks that built his contemporaries’ reputations. He never entered the high-profile competitions that made names for architects of his generation, and the result is a career built almost entirely on steady parish work: St Mary’s at Llanfair Nant Gwyn in Pembrokeshire, St Helen’s at Little Cawthorpe in Lincolnshire, St Peter’s at Lampeter, and closer to home, St Mary’s on Bourne Street in Belgravia. Cardigan Guildhall, one of his few secular commissions, combined a corn exchange, a grammar school, a town hall, a library and a market under one civic roof, the same instinct for a building doing several jobs at once that shaped the Schoolhouse two decades later.

His style favoured solid Decorated Gothic geometry over surface ornament, constructional polychromy in brick rather than applied decoration, and a restraint that made his churches cheap to build without looking cheap. The Ecclesiologist, the period’s most exacting critical journal, praised his church at Little Cawthorpe as an excellent design for economically rebuilding a small rural church, a backhanded kind of praise that describes the whole career: competent, consistent and almost entirely overlooked. Architectural historians have only in the past few years begun giving Withers the closer look his surviving buildings support, and the Schoolhouse, one of his rare London commissions still standing largely intact, is a useful place to start.

What a decade of dereliction left behind, and what came back

By the time Myerscough found it, the Schoolhouse had been empty for around ten years, with false walls and mezzanine floors cut carelessly through some of the original windows. The restoration architects CarverHaggard, a young London practice, worked with the specialist contractor EC1 to strip those later insertions back out rather than build around them, recovering twenty-five original window openings that had been partly boarded up.

What survived underneath was worth recovering carefully. The original encaustic tiles are back in use across the ground floor, alongside cast-iron coal chutes set into flagstones, Victorian gas light fittings retained as fixtures rather than props, and pine floorboards left with their age visible rather than sanded back to something new. Myerscough has described the aim plainly: to keep the building authentic and hold on to its Victorian history rather than smooth it into a generic white cube. The upper gallery, more intimate than the double-height ground floor, sits directly above it, and the two floors together give the gallery roughly 7,000 square feet, room enough to run large-scale sculptural work and more than one exhibition at once.

A staircase built from what the building already owned

The single clearest piece of design thinking in the restoration is the staircase connecting the two exhibition floors. Rather than commission an entirely new structure, CarverHaggard and EC1 salvaged the mahogany from an enclosed 1980s stairwell that had been inserted into the building at some point after its parish use ended, and rebuilt it as an open, floating staircase that reads as sculpture rather than circulation. The wood is original to the building’s own history, just reassigned to a new shape.

The handrail is new work, and it is where the Schoolhouse’s restoration and its gallery programme start to look like the same project. It was hand-stitched by Bill Amberg Studio, a leather specialist whose thirty years of work includes a fifty-one metre handrail across three floors of a Tom Dixon-designed house on Hampstead Heath and a seamless helical stair rail for Asprey’s Foster + Partners-designed New Bond Street store. A vegetable-tanned leather handrail, stitched by hand around a salvaged timber stair, is not a fitting bought from a catalogue. It is the same material intelligence the gallery exists to represent, applied to the building itself before a single artwork goes on the wall.

Sarah Myerscough’s own case for craft

Myerscough founded her gallery in 1998 and has spent the years since arguing against the line separating applied art from fine art, a distinction she has called a form of classification that damages and limits creative experimentation rather than describing anything real about the work itself. Her programme centres on natural materials and the processes that shape them: wood carved and turned, clay fired, leather stitched, textile woven, glass blown, with each artist’s technical command treated as inseparable from their ideas rather than as a footnote to them.

The gallery’s opening exhibitions at the Schoolhouse set out that position immediately. Urkraft, a solo show of roughly thirty wood sculptures in ash, oak and maple by the German turner Ernst Gamperl, ran alongside Accoutrements & Illuminations, oak-tanned leather sculpture by Frances Pinnock, both through into late November 2025. A sequence of group and solo shows has followed through 2026, including Together, Thread and, most recently, Perch alongside the ceramicist Aneta Regel‘s solo exhibition Beneath the Skin. The programme continues in September with Badlands, a solo exhibition by the American sculptor Christopher Kurtz, followed by a showing at PAD London and a winter solo exhibition by Luke Fuller.

The building’s second life is teaching the same lesson as its first

The basement, once given over to the schoolhouse’s own classrooms and reading room, now holds the Crafted Arts Foundation, a charitable initiative Myerscough has launched to run workshops, lectures, residencies and events aimed squarely at the gap she has identified in craft education. She has been direct about the motivation: a general concern that craft is not valued in schools as it should be, and a wish to see that changed. It is worth noticing what that means for a building whose original ground floor plan included a reading room and a set of classrooms for exactly the population who could least afford to be taught elsewhere.

Nobody covering the move has drawn the two uses together, but the parallel does not need much drawing. A Victorian parish institute built to give an under-served congregation somewhere to learn a skill and read a book has become, a century and a half later, a gallery with a foundation in its basement built to give a new generation of makers exactly that kind of access. The building was never repurposed away from its own instincts. It was handed a new audience and asked to keep doing roughly what it was built to do.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The Schoolhouse works as a piece of restoration because CarverHaggard and EC1 treated the building’s own history as material rather than as an obstacle to build around, keeping the tiles, the gas fittings, the coal chutes and even the wrong-era mahogany stairwell rather than clearing the site back to brick. It works as a gallery because Sarah Myerscough has spent more than twenty-five years arguing that craft earns its place in a room like this on its own terms. And it works, most quietly, because the building’s new purpose and its old one turn out to be closer than anyone writing about the move so far has said: a parish schoolroom, still teaching, under a different name.