Permanent Exhibition

So famous were William Heath Robinson’s drawings of absurdly complex machines that his name entered the dictionary. Today, “Heath Robinson” remains shorthand for any wonderfully ingenious contraption designed to achieve a simple task in the most complicated way possible.

But there is far more to the story than the machines. Inspired by Heath Robinson’s autobiography, My Line of Life, our permanent exhibition traces a career that spanned more than fifty years, from his student days in the 1890s to the final works he created during the Second World War.

Along the way, you’ll encounter book illustrations, cartoons, paintings and wartime drawings that reveal the breadth of his talent and imagination. Beyond the famous contraptions lies an artist whose work came to embody a particularly British blend of ingenuity, wit and good-humoured absurdity. Funny, inventive and deeply human, Heath Robinson’s art continues to entertain and surprise while offering a unique window onto a world experiencing technological change every bit as dramatic as our own.