Cowper &Newton Museum

The Cowper & Newton Museum occupies Orchard Side, the red-brick Georgian house on Olney's Market Place where the poet William Cowper lived between 1768 and 1786. It opened to the public in 1900 as the Cowper Memorial Museum and Library, established after local schoolmaster Thomas Wright persuaded the house's then-owner, William Collingridge, to give it to the town. The rooms are presented largely as Cowper would have known them, alongside material on John Newton, the former slave-ship captain turned curate who worked with Cowper on the Olney Hymns, including Amazing Grace. Trustees later added the adjacent kitchen garden, where Cowper's summer house stands, and the Three Hares Art Gallery now occupies part of the building. It is run as an independent charity rather than by the council, open Tuesday to Saturday, with an annual pass included in the admission price.