Founded in 1232 by Ela, Countess of Salisbury, as a nunnery for Augustinian canonesses, Lacock was converted into a private house after the Dissolution of the Monasteries by William Sharington. Sharington retained most of the ground floor of the cloistral court and built upon the upper storeys. A Gothick great hall and gateway were added in 1754-4 by Sanderson Miller for John Ivory Talbot. Further alterations to the south front were made in c.1828-30 by William Fox Talbot, a pioneer of photography. Inside, there is an octagonal Tudor turret room with important Renaissance carvings by John Chapman, mason in the King’s works, a Gothick hall with terracotta statues in niches below ogee canopies and vaulted medieval cloisters with decorated bosses. Lacock Abbey also houses the Fox Talbot Museum devoted to the important contributions made to the founding of photography by this former resident of Lacock.
A collection of Fox Talbot's early photographic experiments - skeletal forms of leaves and flowers and portraits of his family and life at Lacock; plates from The Pencil of Nature (1844-6), the first book to include photographs; and a collection of the work of other pioneers in this field (including Daguerre, Niepce and Wedgwood); and early photographic equipment.
Lacock Abbey, located at the heart of the village within its own woodland grounds, is a quirky country house of various architectural styles, built upon the foundations of a former nunnery. Visitors can experience the atmosphere of the medieval rooms and cloister court, giving a sense of the Abbey's monastic past. The upstairs rooms house the collection and tell the tales of the next 400 years of occupation by the ancestors of Matilda Talbot, the last member of the family to own Lacock. Although the house passed to National Trust in 1944 most of the collection was not purchased from the family until 2009.
