
Photo: Tim Knight, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
One of the earliest surviving merchant's houses in England. It has been restored to its mid-14th-century appearance and replica furnishings provide an insight into medieval life.
The Medieval Merchant's House is a restored late-13th-century building in Southampton, Hampshire, England. Built in about 1290 by John Fortin, a prosperous merchant, the house survived many centuries of domestic and commercial use largely intact. German bomb damage in 1940 revealed the medieval interior of the house, and in the 1980s it was restored to resemble its initial appearance and placed in the care of English Heritage, to be run as a tourist attraction. The house is built to a medieval right-angle, narrow plan design, with an undercroft to store wine at a constant temperature, and a first-storey bedchamber that projects out into the street to add additional space. The building is architecturally significant because, as historian Glyn Coppack highlights, it is "the only building of its type to survive substantially as first built"; it is a Grade I listed building and scheduled monument.
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Built in 1495 for Sir John Dawtry, the Controller of Customs in Southampton.
The Bargate has been refurbished and given a new lease of life as a contemporary art gallery and home to the arts organisation A Space.
A multplex cinema in the new Westquay South complex.
A medieval gatehouse, built about 1180 and extended in 1320, now sits slap bang in the middle of the shopping centre. The top floor is now a Heritage Visitor Centre. The Bargate is also the beginning of the original Old Town Walk (pdf); see Do below.
The museum is dedicated to telling the incredible story of aviation in the Solent area. Exhibits include a Sandringham flying boat (which visitors can enter), a Spitfire, and Schneider Trophy racing seaplanes.
Was created in 1980 at the University of Southampton to combine the University's fine art and special photographic collection. Widely regarded as one of the best places in the country to see contemporary visual art, the gallery also hosts seminars, talks and workshops.