A mouldy old museum...

... and better for it. Go now, before Watts gets a facelift

A friend took me to the Watts Gallery in Surrey to see an exhibition of photographs of Victorian artists, which was fascinating. But what was amazing was the gallery. Why isn't it better known? Loads of people - including me - rave about the Gustave Moreau museum in Paris or Leighton House in Kensington, but the Watts is every inch as weird and wonderful as these.

George Frederic Watts (named for Handel) was a high-minded Victorian painter best known for Hope - that deeply depressing picture of a huddled nude clutching a broken lyre which is in Tate Britain but known around the world. Apparently Nelson Mandela had it in his cell on Robben Island.

There is an early version of Hope in the Watts but that's not a reason for going there - the main reason, apart from the 100 or so Watts paintings on show which, personally, I can take or leave, is the feel of the place, which is at Compton, near Guildford.

Built in 1904, in Arts and Crafts style, with embossed lead doors and carved inscriptions, it is a rambling house-cum-studio-cum-gallery now in a parlous state with humidifiers everywhere fighting against the mould that rampages along the corridors. You feel if you stand still too long you might grow lichen. Along the road from the gallery there's a graveyard on a grassy knoll with a funerary chapel and cloisters built by Watts's wife, Mary, a potter, almost entirely out of terracotta. It's by no means great architecture, but the atmosphere is unforgettable.

But the curator Mark Bills tells me that next year the place is going to be spruced up with a £4.3m lottery grant. The gallery will be closed for two years while the building is restored. In the meantime, the paintings will go on tour to the Guildhall in London and then the United States.

There will be loud fanfares when the gallery reopens, but I think the time to visit is now, while it is still mouldering, there are local new-laid eggs for sale in the bookshop, holes in the ceilings and strange piles of junk in the corridors. Of course, if you crave audio-guides and explanatory captions and all the paraphernalia of modern museum-going, forget it. This is one for connoisseurs of decadence.

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