Your Heritage
1,440 pupils and their teachers visited the exhibition with free entry. Six volunteers and an Artist in Residence ran workshops and other creative learning activities.
Houghton Hall dates from the 1720s and is the former home of Britain’s first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. Now the family seat of Sir Robert Walpole’s direct descendant the 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley, Houghton is considered one of the country’s finest Palladian buildings. By 1736, it housed masterpieces by Poussin, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Van Dyck, but in 1779 the family sold many of these important paintings to Empress Catherine the Great, where they became part of the founding collection of St. Petersburg's State Hermitage Museum in Russia.
In 2013, the collection was returned to Houghton Hall for the first time in over 200 years for a special exhibition that attracted 115,000 visitors.