american museum

Attended the opening of the new exhibition: Hatched, Matched, Dispatched and Patched. If you love textiles and are sensitive to their emotional language, this will delight you! A wonderfully warm and beautiful display - congratulations!!

Visited for the Kafe Fasset exhibition and it was fantastic as it is every year. House and gardens are stunning, and the Tea room is reasonable and comfortable. Not one for very young/excitable children.

This was much bigger than I envisage with a country house, nice gardens and an arts exhibition centre. Bizarre place to have a tribute to American culture but it fits with the Bath georgian theme. The free bus from centre of town is worth taking but fills up fast so arrive early or you could find yourself with an hour wait for the next one.

Thank you for taking time to review, we're pleased you enjoyed your visit and you felt refreshed by our cafe offerings. The Conestoga Wagon is certainly a talking point, as is our wonderful view - always worth a second look don't you think!

This is a fascinating place, only slight disappointment was no american food served in the restaurant

So, the blurb tells us, in 1961, three men decided that as there was no museum of American Culture outside USA they would create one in Bath. Why? What can it bring to us?In a large Georgian house in a beautiful setting it is made up of four parts - Basement, interesting wall boards and displays on Native American Indians, Slavery, Rebellion and Cowboys. There is also a pub interior re-built, So far so good - Ground Floor & First, Room interiors from various periods of USA history, No explanations or guides (it was just before Christmas and another reviewer speculates that they had been removed. There was one room with enormous displays of quilts which were apparently very interesting but not to us - Outside the house, there is a display room of early american painting and artifacts. Very interesting to us but there was an excellent volunteer in there - The Exhibition Hall again outside. This had housed a large fabric exhibition all summer but was now selling Christmas cards except that, hidden away at the back, was an area of early maps of the Americas. We love maps so it pulled us back a bit. I would recognise that,in the Summer, things would be different. The restaurant is good and there are vast areas on terrace seating overlooking the views. Inside however you have to have particular interests to get something from it. I cannot see that there is enough to entertain all but the most studious child. I still get no feeling of what or who it is for.

If you are keen on sewing, this place is for you. There is an enormous selection of hand sew patchwork quilts, and the building generally is of interest too. i really enjoyed my time here.

Wonderful collection of vintage American quilts. I visited to go to a temporary exhibition and sadly didn't have time to view the rest of the museum. It would be worth returning to Bath to visit the whole collection.

Thank you for your review which gives us feedback that we need to improve how to explain our Christmas season more thoroughly. Due to Christmas decorations as we know today not entering the living room until the mid-1800s, and our Period Rooms dating long before this time, we are unable to portray Christmas through the ages in America; to get around this obstacle our Collections Manager comes up with a different theme each year. This allows us to alter the Period Rooms to that particular theme and decorate our wonderful Christmas tree with handmade decorations linked to that theme – this year is literature so, as you saw, the rooms are depicting scenes from different American-set novels. As the rooms are so very different at Christmas, to have the usual information boards in the rooms would cause much confusion; the rooms are not set up as the normal boards would describe and lots of objects are removed and others brought in from storage. The information boards during our Christmas season explain the scene the room is set up for instead.In regards to there only being two guides, I’m sorry you missed them or they were not obvious, but we have to have a minimum of seven guides each day to open; we will take advantage of the closed period training to ask our volunteers to make themselves more visible to visitors.As a regular visitor this may all now give a better understanding to your visit, although we apologise that it was not clear on the day, if you have thoughts on how we can communicate this better we would be pleased for further feedback: enquiries@americanmuseum.org

Although I don't have any special interest in American history, I enjoyed my visit to this museum and wish that I'd given myself more time to take everything in. The information displays are very modern and don't overwhelm you with too much writing, and there are staff on hand if you have any questions. The collections of quilts, rugs, and American folk art are well worth seeing. I'm hoping to return in the summer months to experience the impressive grounds as unfortunately they are closed to visitors in the winter.

An amazing collection of early American furniture and wonderful quilts and rugs ,Nothing to dislike

So much info on the history of the USA. With settlers, the native americans, mexicans. Beautiful rooms. And wonderful folk art. The gardens around it and views are stunning. So worth a visit!

There is a lot to look at in this museum. The quilt exhibition is outstanding,if you can get near. The cafe was very busy and tables were not cleared very quickly.

We spent half a day at this museum and wished it could have been longer. The layout is good and the history of the USA is explained in a variety of ways. The exhibits are fascinating and we cannot wait to go back and take in more of this museum.

lots to see, very different, helpful staff, could do with more display information, nice restaurant, free shuttle bus from Bath city centre