Knocking back fine wine, fermented potato brioche, and smoked eel in a Michelin-starred restaurant is not a traditional West Country endeavor. Nor is wandering around a mega-gallery. But I was recently at Hauser & Wirth Somerset in Bruton with a bellyful of Osip’s tasting menu, looking at Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely’s joint exhibition, “Myths & Machines.” Tinguely’s scrapyard sculptures were juxtaposed with de Saint Phalle’s bold, colorful visions. In one work from 1988, La Grande Tête, the late couple’s practices fuse into a tangle of iron, wood, an electric motor, bungee cord, and lightbulbs. Had I been standing there just over a decade ago, I’d likely have been confronted by hay bales instead of high art. The gallery occupies an old farm on the edge of town, and its transformation is emblematic of Somerset’s unlikely metamorphosis into a contemporary art hotspot.
Manuela and Iwan Wirth, the founders of the powerhouse gallery, owned a home in Somerset before branching out commercially there in 2014. In doing so, they drew the eyes of the contemporary art world to Bruton, a historic settlement of just 3,000 people, and catalyzed the area’s gentrification. Aside from a couple of boarding schools, a roofless 16th-century dovecot, and a train station, Bruton was once unremarkable. Its quaint, narrow high street had a pub, a convenience store, a local museum, and little else. Today, there’s a handful of art galleries, a couple of trendy hotels, and a store selling $100 bath salts. The town is also home to four good restaurants, including Hauser & Wirth Somerset’s Da Costa. Osip—which has its own artist-in-residency program—occupies an old pub three miles away on the edge of a pine forest. The food there is beyond words; the menu blew my mind.
A one-hour-and-45-minute train ride from London, Bruton has become an enclave for bourgeois creative types. But Hauser & Wirth put it on the map well before pandemic-era lockdowns pushed artists, celebrities, and craftspeople to swap the city for Somerset.
Aside from its series of galleries in converted barns and its restaurant, Hauser & Wirth Somerset includes a bar and a high-end farm shop (all three are part of the Wirths’ adjacent Artfarm hospitality operation). There’s also a 1.5-acre perennial meadow at the back designed by Piet Oudolf, and the gallery runs an education program, artist residencies, and public events.
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“Somerset has a rich history of writers, musicians, designers, and artists who have been drawn to the area for generations. It’s encouraging to see more artist-led initiatives, workshops, and creative events developing across Somerset,” Dea Vanagan, senior director of the gallery’s Somerset outpost, told ARTnews. “This reflects the gallery’s ambition from the outset to increase access to great art outside of traditional city centres.”
The county undeniably has a storied cultural past, but Vanagan was modest in sidestepping a key point: namely, that Hauser & Wirth has been instrumental in shaping the local art scene over the past decade or so. It’s unlikely Bruton’s contemporary galleries would have sprung up without the gallery’s countryside beachhead. The gallery even owns one of them—Make, dedicated to contemporary craft. Another, Bo Lee Gallery, is located in a former Methodist church at the bottom of the town’s main drag. It launched in 2022 and made its Armory Show debut this year, showing works by artists including Somerset-based Alice Kettle.
“The gallery is housed in a former Methodist church where the art is given space to breathe, and so are the viewers,” Jemma Hickman, the gallery’s director who previously ran a space in London, told ARTnews.”The quiet, the light, and the sense of pause invite lingering in a way that London galleries, with their constant motion, don’t always allow.”
Hauser & Wirth Somerset. Photo Vincent Evans.
She added: “In my London gallery, where I was based in Peckham, I would speak to collectors that wouldn’t travel from North to South, but in Somerset we are visited by collectors from all over the world.”
The gallery was called Bo Lee and Workman until the beginning of this month when its co-founder, Alice Workman, decided to go it alone as an independent advisor. She was the first director of Hauser & Wirth Somerset before Vanagan. “Over the past decade, the arts scene in Bruton and the wider Somerset area has grown significantly, becoming increasingly vibrant,” she told ARTnews. “While Hauser & Wirth Somerset’s arrival in 2014 brought national and international attention to the town and accelerated its cultural development, it built upon creative foundations that were already in place.”
Workman said that Bruton offers a different pace from London: “Collectors and visitors make intentional journeys here…to spend meaningful time with the work.”
I visited textile artist Kettle in her idyllic studio just outside Frome, a 20-minute drive north of Bruton. She moved there in 2019. I asked whether she ever felt at a disadvantage being based outside London. “London comes to us. The deep immersion into work without distraction is a freedom,” she said. “There is a rich network of creative relationships here, as well as a closeness to the landscape that feeds and replenishes every part of yourself. The disadvantage is that you cannot see as many exhibitions and people in London as you would otherwise; there is a remove.”
Bo Lee Gallery, which is hosting a solo show titled “Balancing Act” by Kettle from February 7 to April 11, 2026, sold several of her textiles at the Armory Show, including a large piece called Vinculum (2025) to a foundation. Her work also featured in a group show at Bristol’s Royal West of England Academy (RWA) over the summer.
Artists Daisy Parris (represented by Sim Smith Gallery, London), Antonia Showering (represented by Timothy Taylor Gallery, London and New York), and Sinead Breslin (represented by Andrea Festa, Rome) also call Somerset home. “Living and working in rural Somerset has helped me reduce the background noise—relative quiet, space, and a more expansive sense of time is hugely benefiting my practice right now,” Limerick-born Breslin told me. She moved out of London in 2022 and is working toward a solo show at Andrea Festa in January. Her studio, a converted barn next to an old water mill dating back to the 1700s, was full of psychologically-loaded paintings earmarked for Rome.
The county’s contemporary arts scene is not confined to Bruton. Take Close Gallery, for example, located in the village of Hatch Beauchamp. Founded by Freeny Yianni in 2019, it is currently showing the group exhibition “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” featuring artists including Ted Rogers and Hew Locke. Close is also hosting another group show in London in partnership with Proposition Studios. Titled “After Nature,” the exhibition was organized by former Tate Britain curator Ben Tufnell and runs until February 14.
“‘After Nature’ has always been about attunement to place, to materials, and to our shifting relationship with the natural world,” Yianni told me when I visited. “Bringing this exhibition from the Somerset countryside to Bethnal Green in London allows us to explore that dialogue in a new way, within an urban environment shaped by human history, industry, and renewal.”
And then there’s Banksy’s home city of Bristol, with a population of nearly 500,000. (Technically, it only borders Somerset, as it is its own ceremonial county, but many locals would argue it is Somerset to its core.) It has a “dynamic, busy, and thriving” contemporary art scene, RWA’s curator and head of exhibitions, Dr. Kathryn Johnson, told me. “We are proud of our museum’s long history of bringing exceptional art to the South West.”Also central to Bristol’s cultural landscape are Spike Island and Arnolfini. I visited the latter over the summer to see Sahara Longe’s solo show, “The Other Side of the Mountain.” She studied at—and dropped out of—Bristol University and, like Showering, is also represented by Timothy Taylor. She told me at the time, “To have left Bristol very unsure and worried about the future and come back to show at Arnolfini, where so many artists I have admired—such as Peter Doig, Bridget Riley, and Richard Long—have been shown, is personally very significant to me.”
Somerset and Bruton’s cultural development—similar to that of regional English towns like Margate, which has benefited from local artist Tracey Emin’s initiatives—shows what can happen when the UK art world looks beyond London.
Close gallery’s founder Freeny Yianni (R) and director Richard Scarry (L) in Somerset.
