History of Helen Ede’s Bedroom

During the time Jim and Helen Ede lived at Kettle’s Yard from 1957 to 1973 – when the house was open to visitors daily between 2pm and 4pm – Helen Ede’s bedroom remained a private space that was not accessible to those Jim Ede showed around. Helen’s bedroom and bathroom is located directly above Jim’s on the first floor of the cottages, leading off the sitting room containing her beloved Bechstein piano.
Grandchildren Jane and Caroline (nicknamed ‘Quince’) remember Helen Ede’s room as an informal space – which they experienced in contrast to the nature of the spaces Jim Ede maintained throughout the rest of the house. Jane recalls ‘sewing, everywhere’, and children’s drawings which their grandmother was always interested to see.
The Edes’ granddaughter Quince shared her recollections of her grandmother’s room recently. She writes:
It was a place of welcome, fun, laughter, stories, conversation, all laced with a slight sense of wickedness because all happening behind the closed door. In the room there was of course her bed, in which she frequently lay, beside the window looking onto the churchyard. There was an ironing board always present, complete with electric iron, and a table with a plain pine top, not polished. […] There was a tubular chrome chair with white padded seat and back, by the table. I think on the wall there was a picture of the sea, perhaps it was a photograph, in any case it was unlike the paintings everywhere else, and a Winifred Nicholson. I have always loved Winifred’s paintings but I have no idea which one it was. It was all a long time ago! At one end or the other of the bed there was a high cupboard, and there was her desk, a bureau with drawers, but I dont remember where these things were in the room.
[…] She was always reading, there must have been a bedside table for her books and knitting, ever present but not welcome in the house (they did of course emerge, often!) There was one of those metal table lamps with a flat base, a flexible chrome stand and an enamelled shade, quite small. Her sewing machine, also ever-present on the table […] The room was a source of delight, of wisdom, of feeling grown-up and being listened to, of feeling helpful and keen to please. She loved music, passionately, but I think we didn’t have music in her room, we listened to records lying on the floor in the next room […]
In summary she writes that Kettle’s Yard was, for a while, ‘my home from home, I loved going there’ and that Helen and Jim Ede ‘were my favourite people in the world.’


After Jim and Helen left the house in 1973, moving to Edinburgh, Helen’s room was used as an office for the staff who took on the work of caring for the house and running the gallery, but this is something Jim later complained about. After a return visit to Kettle’s Yard in September 1977, in a report to the curators, he wrote:
“Since I heard not so long ago that the bedroom on this floor had been turned into an office I have felt it a great loss to the house – both my wife and I hoped that when we left it would become a very beautiful extension to the sitting room…”
He complained about the bed having been removed and describes himself as ‘shocked […] to find the bathroom had been gutted for further accommodation’. Leaving these elements in place, Ede felt, ‘would give further meaning to this part of Kettle’s Yard at least being a home’, and thought that rather than office space, the room could be used for changing displays, suggesting the large number of drawings by the Italian artist Mario Sironi (1885-1961) that he had latterly acquired through the American collector – and founder of the Estorick Collection in London – Eric Estorick (1913-1993).


At some point in the late 1970s, the office space was converted back into a bedroom/ bathroom, and among the archive papers from this period is a rough layout on tracing paper of where the furniture might go, with suggestions of artworks for the walls.
Since then, Helen’s bedroom has been a space for a variety of temporary displays drawing on artworks in the Reserve Collection (artworks that are part of the Kettle’s Yard collection, but not on permanent display in the house) as well as, occasionally, projects with artists. For the 1995 exhibition curated by Michael Harrison and Sarah Glennie, entitled Open House, for example, artist and filmmaker Judith Goddard (b. 1956) once again closed off the space to visitors. As the catalogue states,
a transparent Perspex screen will prevent access into Helen’s room. The doorway will afford a limited view of the room. The furniture (none of it original to Helen’s time at Kettle’s Yard) will be rearranged to heighten the feeling of a tableau. […]
Playing with the idea of privacy and withdrawal, Goddard used a surveillance camera in the (unseen) corner of the room to slowly survey the space, including the view out of the window, with the live images transmitted to a monitor on top of the large chest of drawers that was then placed facing the doorway. As Goddard notes, the view to the churchyard out of the window in the upstairs bedroom was reproduced in Jim Ede’s 1984 book on Kettle’s Yard, A Way of Life – one of the few instances he mentions Helen Ede in the book.
More recent artists using the space have included Linder – whose sound piece The One Who Benefits in Every Way was located in Helen Ede’s bedroom for the duration of her 2020 exhibition at Kettle’s Yard, along with sculptural works from her series The Lives of Women Dreaming (2004), photo-montages, and works from the reserve collection that Linder selected. In 2022 a number of photographs by Mariana Cook (b. 1955) were displayed in the room, one of several artists affiliated with Ivorypress whose works were shown around the house.

The New Display in Helen Ede’s Bedroom



The current selection of artworks brings together works by artists the Edes were close to, emphasising friendships and familial relations. It includes works by David Jones, a frequent house guest, and Abani Roy, who lived with the Edes in Hampstead when the Ede’s daughters Elisabeth and Mary were young. A painting by Kate Nicholson is also included. Nicholson came to Cambridge with her mother, Winifred Nicholson to stay with the Edes at Kettle’s Yard as a young artist.
Other works in the display depict the natural environment where Helen Ede was happiest, as in Winifred Nicholson’s White Saxifrage (aka Wild Lilies, Greece) from 1966, or Ceri Richards lyre bird studies – a frequent motif for the artist.
Visit the new display in Helen Ede’s bedroom by booking tickets to the Kettle’s Yard house.
