Fulham Palace has transformed.
You may already know that we have recently completed a £3.8 million restoration project which conserved the building, opened more historic rooms and reinterpreted the collection. However, you might not know that much of the project was enhanced by volunteer involvement: amongst other projects, volunteers led hard hat tours of the site during the building works and the reinterpretation research.
Fulham Palace remains free of charge and is now open seven days a week. However, now we have longer opening times and have more historic spaces on display, we need your help. One historic room, Bishop Porteus’ library, often has to remain closed because we need a volunteer to be in the room whenever it’s open. It’s a fascinating room with a long and varied history – and we want to be able to share it with as many people as possible.
If you can spare a few hours a week, we would be delighted if you consider becoming a front of house volunteer. As well as helping to keep Bishop Porteus’s library open, you’d be welcoming visitors on our front desk, manning the till in the shop and speaking to visitors in the museum rooms. To say thank you to all of our volunteers we offer regular socials, four trips to other heritage sites around London and a complimentary coach trip each year to slightly farther flung places.
With a few more volunteers, this fascinating room with a wealth of history (and even a secret door!) can welcome visitors once again.
Find out more about volunteering at Fulham Palace
Bishop Porteus’s library
Bishop Porteus’s library is named after Beilby Porteus (Bishop of London from 1787 – 1809). In his will he made provision for a library to be built to accommodate his collection of books and portraits of his predecessors. Porteus, a committed opponent of the slave trade, had 145 books and pamphlets on the subject. When Porteus died there were not enough funds for a new building, so his successor, Bishop Howley, arranged for Samuel Pepys Cockerell to convert what had been a chapel into the library.
