Burrell Collection

What it is

The Burrell Collection is a civic museum in Pollok Country Park, three miles south of central Glasgow, built to hold the roughly 9,000 objects that Sir William Burrell spent seventy-five years buying. Burrell, born in Glasgow in 1861 and dead in 1958, made his money as a shipping merchant and bought his first painting at fifteen with money meant for a cricket bat. He was knighted in 1927 for services to art, and in 1944 he and his wife Constance gave the whole collection to the City of Glasgow, on the condition that it be shown somewhere people could see it in a countryside setting. That condition is why the museum stands in a park rather than on a city street: a suitable site took decades to find, and the building finally opened in 1983 to more than a million visits in its first year. Glasgow Life, the charity that runs the city's museums on behalf of Glasgow City Council, manages it alongside Kelvingrove, the Riverside Museum and GoMA. After a long refurbishment the museum reopened in March 2022, and in 2023 it was named Art Fund Museum of the Year. Entry is free, and there is no ticket to book.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

What's inside

Only about 2,000 of the 9,000 objects are on display at any time, which is why the museum reads as a curated building rather than a warehouse. The galleries are arranged over three floors around a central hub of stairs and lifts, and they are named by position: the North Gallery for sculpture from ancient civilisations, the East Galleries where the woodland is deliberately brought inside through glass, the Central Galleries, the South East Gallery, the South Galleries built around glass itself, and the Makers Galleries covering historical and contemporary craft. The strengths are specific. There is one of the most significant holdings of Chinese art in the United Kingdom, more than 200 tapestries ranked among the finest anywhere, medieval stained glass, arms and armour, Islamic ceramics, metalwork and carpets including the Wagner Garden Carpet, and French nineteenth-century painting with more than twenty works by Degas alone. The museum's own list of thirty highlights includes Rodin's The Thinker, a Rembrandt self portrait of 1632, Degas's Portrait of Edmond Duranty, Cezanne's The Chateau of Medan, a Limoges reliquary casket of about 1200, and a Ming meiping vase. Digital displays carry British Sign Language, captions and ten languages, and the free Bloomberg Connects app holds an audio guide for the building.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

How long to spend

Allow two and a half hours. The museum does not publish a suggested visit length anywhere on its own site, so that figure is a planning estimate rather than an operator's number, and it is built from what the operator does publish. The guided highlights tour sold to groups runs for one hour and covers only the stars of the collection, so an hour is the floor for someone walking the same route alone without stopping. Three floors, six named gallery ranges and roughly 2,000 objects on show will absorb three hours comfortably if the tapestries and the Chinese ceramics hold a visitor's attention, and four if the digital displays do too. Two things shorten the day at the back end rather than the front: the museum closes at 17.00 every day, and the restaurant stops taking orders at 15.15, after which only sandwiches and cakes are available. Add travel time inside the park as well. The free shuttle bus from the Pollokshaws Road entrance runs a loop of twenty to thirty minutes, so arriving without a car can add half an hour at each end that has nothing to do with the galleries.

Checked 2026-08-26

Season and crowds

The opening time changes with the day, and this is the single detail most likely to waste a morning. Monday to Thursday and Saturday the museum opens at 10.00. Friday and Sunday it opens at 11.00. Closing is 17.00 on all seven days, so a Friday or Sunday visit is an hour shorter than the same visit on a Tuesday. There is no weekly closing day and no midday break. The quietest hour is the first one, which means 10.00 from Monday to Thursday and on Saturday; the same trick does not work on Friday or Sunday, when everybody arrives together at 11.00. Because entry is free and untimed there is no booking system to smooth arrivals, so the car park rather than the door is the bottleneck at weekends and in school holidays. If lunch matters, eat early: the restaurant closes at 16.00, an hour before the galleries, and last orders are at 15.15. Pollok Country Park is worth an hour of daylight on either side of the museum, which argues for the longer days between spring and early autumn. The site publishes no seasonal hours and no list of public holiday closures, so check before travelling around Christmas and New Year.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Tickets

Entry to the museum is free. The operator states it plainly on its visitor pages, there is no timed ticket to book and no admission desk to queue at, so a visitor can simply walk in during opening hours. What does cost money is parking, and the charges are posted for the Burrell Collection car park: from 10.00 to 18.00 seven days a week, £1.50 per hour for one to three hours, £7 for up to four hours, and £12 for five to eight hours. Payment is by card at the pay and display machines, by coin in 20p, 50p, £1 and £2 pieces with no change given, or through the RingGo app, which does not accept payment by QR code. Parking is free for blue badge holders, who have nineteen marked bays in front of the museum, and National Trust membership does not give free parking here. Temporary exhibitions and guided experiences are separate: the group tour packages the museum publishes are priced per person, with the hour-long highlights tour at £24 a head and a minimum charge for fifteen people. Membership and donations are voluntary and support the collection rather than buying entry.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Getting there

A car is not needed, and on a busy day it is a liability. Trains from Glasgow Central take about ten minutes to Pollokshaws West, from which the park entrance at 2060 Pollokshaws Road is under a five-minute walk: leave the station, turn left, and the entrance appears shortly on the left. Shawlands station is a ten-minute walk from the same entrance. Buses from the city centre take roughly twenty minutes: routes 57 and 57A stop directly opposite the park entrance on Pollokshaws Road, route 3 runs to Shawbridge Street with the stop at Shawholm Crescent, and routes 34 and 34A stop on Dumbreck Road opposite Haggswood Avenue. Inside the park a free electric shuttle bus runs seven days from 10.00 to 18.15, looping every twenty to thirty minutes between the Pollokshaws Road entrance, the museum and Pollok House. It takes one wheelchair at a time. Cyclists reach the park on National Cycle Network routes 7 and 75 and there are covered racks in front of the building. Drivers use junction 2 of the M77 and the postcode G43 1AT, entering at 2060 Pollokshaws Road and reaching the car park by Pollok Avenue, taking the signposted first right.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

What to watch out for

Cars can no longer drive through the middle of Pollok Country Park, and satellite navigation has not caught up. The museum warns that Google Maps may direct drivers to turn at Knowehead Avenue, which is a restricted route; the correct approach is Pollok Avenue and the signposted first right. There are two public car parks in the park and they are not interchangeable — the Burrell Collection car park is reached from Pollokshaws Road, while the Riverside car park at Pollok House is reached from Lochinch Road, and the six electric vehicle charging points are at the Riverside one. Spaces are not guaranteed, and when the car parks fill, park staff turn cars back out of the park. Only assistance dogs are allowed inside the building, although dogs may travel on the shuttle bus subject to space. On accessibility the building is unusually well equipped: step-free level access from the car park into the ground floor, lifts to all three floors, a hearing loop, manual wheelchairs lent from the reception desk on a first-come basis, nine accessible toilets and two Changing Places toilets, the first pair in any Scottish museum. A drop-off point sits outside the arched Heritage entrance, reached by intercom at the barrier.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Photography

Photography is allowed, with conditions that are worth reading before raising a camera. Glasgow Life Museums welcomes hand-held camera and phone photography, filming and sketching for personal, non-commercial use. Equipment is where it stops: selfie sticks, tripods, monopods, gimbals and any additional lighting are not permitted, and neither are easels. Some objects, displays and loan exhibitions cannot be photographed at all because of copyright or lender restrictions, and where that applies there is clear signage on the case. Objects, plinths and cases must never be touched. Sharing on social media is encouraged as long as it stays private and non-commercial, which explicitly rules out promoting a brand, monetised accounts, affiliate links and images intended for sale; in-copyright works should be credited to the artist or rights holder. People are only to be photographed with their consent, and children outside a visitor's own group, including school parties, not at all. Sketchers may use graphite, coloured pencils and white chalk but not charcoal, crayons, coloured chalk, watercolour or any wet material, and stools can be borrowed in most galleries. Torches are allowed for up to thirty seconds at a time, ultraviolet ones never. Commercial permission is requested in advance from the Glasgow Life photo library.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Where it is

Nearby

External links

• View on Wikidata