Skip to main content
University of Cambridge

Open: Tuesday–Sunday, 11am–5pm

We are closed on Bank Holiday Mondays

Kettle’s Yard will be closed for the festive period between 24 December 2024 – 1 January 2025 inclusive. We will open as normal from 2 January 2025.

Book Tickets

Open: Tuesday–Sunday, 11am–5pm

We are closed on Bank Holiday Mondays

Kettle’s Yard will be closed for the festive period between 24 December 2024 – 1 January 2025 inclusive. We will open as normal from 2 January 2025.

Theme: Home life

Listen to the recordings

These clips describe how Jim and Helen Ede came to convert four derelict cottages to create Kettle’s Yard and what their daily life was like when they lived in Cambridge. You can also hear memories from their time in London and how Jim hosted visitors at Kettle’s Yard.

Read the transcripts

Famous visitors to the Edes’ London home in 1920s and 30s

David Jones was a very close friend and he came very often at weekends and he liked to drink beer so he used to bring it round from the pub in a jug because the parents never suggested… I mean, now if I had a visitor who liked beer, we would get it in for them before they came, but it was far too expensive I expect. David used to sit there and drink this beer, very contented. I really loved him, he was a lovely person. And another rather fun thing was all these actors and actresses who came in. They were very noisy and demonstrative, calling each other darling all the time, I remember that, and they didn’t take a lot of notice of us, you know, people like John Gielgud and Edith Evans and Peggy Ashcroft but the nice one, for us, was Ralph Richardson because he was aware of our presence and took us out in his car. We didn’t have a car so it was very exciting and he used to drive us, it was an open sports car, and he used to drive us and take us to a sweet shop somewhere quite far away and was very nice. They tended to come in groups. Laurence Olivier too, they all called him Larry, and he was really at the beginning of his career. So that was exciting and then there were ballet people and, very exciting for us because we must have been a bit older, there was an Indian ballet and we, Mary and I, got very keen on them all. They had lovely costumes and it was beautiful dancing and we actually went and saw them and then my parents took me to Romeo and Juliet and Mummy made me a pink dress for the occasion and we sat in the front of the dress circle. I don’t know how we got… how they afforded it but these sort of things were really memorable.

Moving to Cambridge and converting the cottages in 1957

I know that Jim was looking for somewhere where he could show people round and make them appreciate nice surroundings. He did think of a big country house that he would look after and show the public round and then for some reason they chose to rent a place in Cambridge for a bit because of course they had to live somewhere and that was in Maid’s Causeway. It was while they were there, I think, that they heard about these cottages which the Cambridge Preservation Society didn’t want to have them pulled down because they’d got rather special roofs. Jim bought them. Where he found the money we don’t know. He bought them and we visited Merton Lodge, which is a house opposite, which had a lot of stairs and I always worried that that may have set Mummy’s heart trouble off, but that’s probably nonsense. They lived there and we came and visited in 1957 and at that stage, a lot of building was going on. I suppose, always when constructing new places, Jim got agitated and quarrelsome, trying to get it just the way he wanted. I suppose you’d use the word perfectionist and like all perfectionists, it wasn’t pleasant for the people round about.

Jim Ede’s bedroom and cleaning routine

There is currently no transcript available for this clip.

Jim’s welcome to the house and afternoon tea ritual, 1960s

And so there was that initial tour around the house with Jim, sometimes just one-on-one, sometimes a group of three or four people, and in the course of an afternoon, probably fifteen to twenty people might go through the house. He also had a way of signalling to maybe four or five, five or six people that he’d quite like them to hang back at 4 o’clock because there would be tea and toast around the long oak bench table in the dining room, in the dining alcove. You were not invariably asked, in fact he tried to invite different people, but it became something of a pattern and among the regulars there were several of us who were identified as people who would help with a little… by being more familiar with the house and its contents and with Jim as a personality, would actually help socially to put first time visitors at their ease. So, in one way or another, I became involved as a kind of Jim helper and regular taker of tea and tea was a complete ritual. It was always lapsang souchong served out of a Queen Anne silver teapot into cracked and stapled china cups which had travelled half way around the world, they’d clearly had them in North Africa as well as France, but Jim never threw anything away. If something got damaged it was mended. And along with tea came burnt brown toast, because he was usually too busy talking as he toasted the toast under the gas grill to actually take it out in time, and honey and homemade marmalade. That was it. That was a completely invariable feast, every day at 4 o’clock. It was in many ways Jim’s main meal. This was a man who’d been gassed in the trenches in the First World War and had had gastric problems for the rest of his life and his diet, as I got to know him better, of course, I discovered about these things, his diet consisted of Complain, that invalid food which he had for dinner every night so tea and toast really was a high point in his day.

Jim rearranged his friends’ homes

He would pop into our house and he could be quite shocked by me when I was wearing a dressing gown on a Saturday morning having had a little bit of a lie in and… ‘what, not up yet?’ and so on. He was quite critical of this, gently rebuking me, I felt. The following Saturday I thought, I must get out, get up early enough and not be caught by Jim. So he was quite firm about things like that but also he would like to wander round and tell us where to put things and how to hang things and tell us little tiny tips, like I said, like when I was in the flat, when we were in the flat in Magdalene Street about how to not have the flap of our 18th century folky oak table, not having the flap down but deliberately putting it up and pulling the legs out that held it up, underneath it, because although it made a wider surface in a small room, it opened up and therefore gave a better sense of space. These kind of things. He was horrified by the chairs that some friend of my mother’s had temporarily given us, they were rather ugly-looking little chairs and he came around with his own cloth and covered them all, these dreadful objects. Oh, really, I was quite under his sway and Jean [Barrington Ward] was very willing to be too. We both entered into the vision really.

Jim’s role in the local community

In those days, also, Jim used to keep an eye on one or two of the people who lived in the retirement houses at the back of Kettle’s Yard. Old Mrs Brookes, I remember, was rather infirm so one of the things you did was you always popped in to see Mrs Brookes in the afternoon and offered to put the kettle on. Looking after Kettle’s Yard was quite a wide ranging experience and it did involve other people as well. There was an old tramp who used to come past that Jim was very fond of who always came at about 10 o’clock in the morning and Jim said, ‘Now don’t be worried if you hear this strange noise outside the door because he doesn’t talk to himself, he shouts, and sometimes he gets quite worked up and you get worried, you know, you wonder what on earth it’s about’. He said, ‘But don’t worry, he’ll ring the bell and when you open the door, he’ll say ‘morning sIr’ and hand you his tea tin’. He said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t let him into the house, I never let him cross the threshold. But take his tea tin and he’ll wait patiently while you fill it up for him’. Sure enough, exactly the same thing happened. I heard this terrible commotion outside, this man who was ranting and raving and as soon as I opened the door, ‘morning sir’, and there was the tea tin. That was at 10 o’clock on a Wednesday morning and at 2.30 in the afternoon, the actor Sir Ralph Richardson was on the doorstep saying, ‘Where’s my friend Jim? He never goes away, why isn’t he here?’ So it was a fascinating experience and I think probably it did make me feel that I wanted to work with the arts in some way.

Introduction to the house in 1973

Kettle’s Yard is a house and it is situated in Cambridge and is a part of the university there. It might be called a museum for there are a great many pictures there and much sculpture. But there are also a lot of pebbles and it is astonishing how often a pebble can look like something quite different – a duck, a torso of a man or a woman, sometimes both. I’m constantly amazed by the beauty of form and space, the glitter of light on surfaces. Glass and china play their part, even cracked teacups into which light falls, like sunshine into pools, and all this makes a home to live in, a place for people to visit and feel at home. We and our friends have lived here for 17 years and it is hard to convey the domestic side of Kettle’s Yard. In 1957 it was four little deserted slum-houses with an alleyway running between them. They were scooped out and turned into one house and the alleyway was bridged and so gradually as the cottages became a place, we began to invite people in. They came cautiously, one at a time, perhaps two, but as the years swept by, more people came until we reached ten thousand visits in the year.

Continuing Jim’s routines after the Edes left in 1973

I think for a lot of people, me included, he was a ghost, a kind of presence and we constructed what it must have been like and we, very quickly through talking to Betty [Thompson] or whoever, would pick up the things that they remembered about Jim being there so, like, selected people being invited to stay after four, and they would sit round this table here, and the crockery was still in the kitchen so we used to make cups of tea and people would say, ‘I used to come here when Jim was here and we did this, that and the other’, and you’d pick that up. Of course you then had the people who one gradually felt to be the guardians of the true flame who would come in and say, ‘Op, I see that’s moved three inches to the right’, or whatever. Of course, people who were much closer to Jim that I was would come in, having visited Jim in Edinburgh, and bring back reports or questions and occasionally stuff.

The house less domestic than first appearances

I think it’s worth emphasizing that, as far as I understand, the very idea of domesticity that Jim had was quite unusual in itself. He was apparently always hiding his own personal possessions before visitors came in, for example, so it was not, never, the kind of domestic environment that you’d expect to find when you walk into someone’s home. It was always quite controlled and certainly not something that would have that element of unpredictability and chance, you know, finding things that shouldn’t really be there. Jim was always very aware of the position of pretty much everything so in that sense, you know, it’s not the kind of domestic environment that one would associate with everyday living.

Biographies of the interviewees