Burrell Collection

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The buildings that house the Burrell Collection

The Burrell Collection is an art collection in the city of Glasgow, in Scotland. It is situated in Pollok Country Park on the south side of the city.

The collection was gifted to the city of Glasgow by Sir William Burrell in 1944. The gift was made on the condition that the collection was to be housed in a building 16 miles from the centre of Glasgow, to show the works to their greatest advantage, and to avoid the damaging effects of air pollution at the time. The trustees spent over 20 years trying to find a suitable 'home' for the collection, one which met all the criteria set out in the Trust Deed, without success. Eventually, when The Pollok Estate was gifted to the city in 1967 , the Trustees had certain terms of the deed waived, which allowed the current site to be chosen for the collection. A building designed and constructed to house the collection was opened by the Queen in 1983, and was named as Scotland's second greatest post-war building (after Gillespie, Kidd & Coia's St. Peter's Seminary) in a poll of architects by Prospect magazine in 2005.

The Burrell contains an important collection of medieval art, works by Degas and Cezanne, modern sculpture and a whole host of other artefacts from around the world, all collected by one man.