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Tim Knox

Director, Sir John Soane's Museum

Tim Knox

Born in Africa in 1962, he was brought up in Nigeria and Fiji before completing his education in Britain. A graduate of the Courtauld Institute of Art, he was later Assistant Curator at the Royal Institute of British Architects Drawings Collection. In 1995 he joined the National Trust and in 1996 succeeded Gervase Jackson-Stops as its Architectural Historian. He was appointed Head Curator of the National Trust in 2002, taking over the direction of the research, care and presentation of the 450 historic properties in its care. He was one of the major champions for the Trust’s recent acquisition of Tyntesfield, that staggering Gothic Revival country house near Bristol with all its extraordinary contents. He was also deeply involved in such diverse NT projects as the restoration of Stowe Landscape Gardens, the acquisition of The Workhouse, a grim early nineteenth-century ‘house of industry’ at Southwell, Nottinghamshire, and the rescue of the Darnley Mausoleum in Cobham Park, Kent. In recent years he has spearheaded efforts to retain historic collections in National Trust houses. He was Chairman of the Mausolea and Monuments Trust between 2000 and 2004, and is a Trustee of the Spitalfields Trust. He is a member of the Government’s Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art, and regularly writes and lectures on art, architecture and the history of collecting. Tim Knox lives in Stepney in the East End of London, where he has restored from dereliction an eighteenth-century merchant’s house as a setting for his eclectic collections of art and natural history.