Rose Balston

Rose Balston Rose Balston is a London- and Dubai-based art historian, speaker, guide and TV presenter. This includes historic houses, streets, museums and galleries.

She is the founding director of ArtscapesUK, a London-based cultural experiences company. Art History UK is a specialist art historical tour company operating in London. We run around four tours a month in London's places of artistic and historical interest. They take place on weekends, evenings and during the week, and last from 1hr45 to the whole day. We aim to inspire, excite and inform our tou

r-goers, with stories, little known facts and a big dose of humour. Founded by Rose Balston, Art History UK combines fresh enthusiasm with unrivalled knowledge and the desire to share it. We pride ourselves on combining this scholarship with extensive tour guiding experience, attention to detail, juicy tales, conversation, challenging ideas and a fascinating exploration of the hidden corners of London’s past. Testimonials

"AHUK has given me two excellent days opening my eyes to interesting London sights. Rose is a delightful guide, the enthusiasm for her subject is infectious. Her days are planned meticulously; her groups feel both well informed and well looked after at the end of the day." MW (Greenwich)

“I would strongly recommend joining a tour put on by Art History UK…in three brief hours, we were inspired to levels of wonder”
-Mark Hedges, Editor of Country Life

"I came away from our day at Greenwich feeling completely uplifted. Your breadth of knowledge is incredible and your enthusiasm for your subject is infectious - you kept us captivated from beginning to end. Keeping the groups small made it all seem wonderfully personal from our point of view. Your organisation skills are superb as everything worked like clockwork.Thank you enormously for a truly memorable day." GG (Greenwich)

"We loved loved loved our day with Rose on Thursday. She has such a light touch – full of facts and intriguing details; she speaks so easily and engagingly. How lovely it would be to look at the rest of London with her as a guide!"
RS (Georgian/Medieval)

Portmeirion - Vanity or Vision?Clough Williams-Ellis bought this stretch of coast in 1925, called it a “neglected wilder...
03/08/2026

Portmeirion - Vanity or Vision?

Clough Williams-Ellis bought this stretch of coast in 1925, called it a “neglected wilderness,” and spent the next fifty years building an invented Italianate village out of it — a fictional harbour town, pastel-coloured, wildly theatrical, and to me, extremely weird. Much of it was assembled from salvaged fragments of buildings demolished elsewhere in Wales and Cheshire, which he called his “home for fallen buildings.”

He wanted to prove Portmeirion could be both beautiful and commercially viable and that “sensitive” development could enhance a landscape rather than ruin it. At the same time, he was a founding figure in the campaign to protect the English and Welsh countryside from careless building — which strikes me as rather ironic, given he saw no contradiction in building the most extraordinarily artificial village imaginable a few miles down the same coast. I’m aware this makes me sound faintly insufferable when really we could just enjoy it, eat our ice creams and revel in the views….

Still, it was built in a region where the slate industry, once employing tens of thousands, was already collapsing. And I certainly couldn’t work out who actually benefited beyond the man who built it. If it wasn’t just one big vanity project, I’d love to know more. What I will say: today, whatever the original motives, it clearly brings real tourism and income into this part of Wales, which can only be a good thing. And the ice-creams were delicious.

Rex Whistler spent two years, 1936 to 1938, painting an entire invented seaport across one wall of the dining room at Pl...
29/07/2026

Rex Whistler spent two years, 1936 to 1938, painting an entire invented seaport across one wall of the dining room at Plas Newydd House in Anglesea. Fifty-eight feet of it, the largest canvas in the country and a wealth of fabulous detail that I spent a long time drinking up.

It is a wonderful hotchpotch of different realities - vaguely British buildings next an Italianate town, an imagined harbour that never existed anywhere but on this wall, a suggestion of Snowdonia… People dotted across the whole scene getting on with their lives. Pushing carts, begging for alms, rowing boats, collecting fish, playing a pipe, kicking a football, stealing some fruit - can you see these details from my photos?

Down by the water, Neptune’s crown and trident sit propped against a balustrade, abandoned. Wet footprints lead up the steps and straight into the room, as if the sea god had slipped in to join the family for dinner, invisible, leaving only the evidence behind him. There are portraits of the family dogs - including the rather grand looking “Cheeky”, wearing a pearl necklace and sitting in a state of majesty on her pink cushion. She’s buried in the garden at Plas Newydd.

Tucked into one of the painted colonnades is a young man sweeping up rose petals. This is Rex Whistler himself. He’d fallen in love with the Marquess’s daughter, Lady Caroline, while working on the commission - unrequited. It’s all a bit poignant seeing him there, sweeping in the corner of someone else’s dining room. Particularly when bearing in mind his story - he didn’t entirely finish the mural. Partway through painting over a ship, he ran out of a particular white paint and simply stopped, that passage still visibly incomplete today. He joined the Welsh Guards in 1939 and on 18 July 1944, on his first day of combat, was killed by mortar fire in Normandy. He was 39.

He always meant to come back and finish it.

If heading up to , please visit this amazing piece of art.

The east wall of St Andrew’s Chapel, inside St John’s Church . The window is on fire with colour. Fifteen years of comm...
24/07/2026

The east wall of St Andrew’s Chapel, inside St John’s Church .

The window is on fire with colour. Fifteen years of community fundraising and every person who gave is now part of it. Woven into the glass alongside those they wanted remembered. It is a memorial, but not a solemn one - instead one that radiates positivity in circumstances that are, in some instances, completely tragic.

Thomas Denny built the whole thing around the idea of “seeing” — glory glimpsed in the middle of daily life, which in its own right is also glorious.

The Transfiguration sits at the centre, blazing, unmistakably the EXTRAordinary moment. But it is what goes on around the edges that I find so captivating - deer moving through open fields, birds scattered loose across the sky, foxes and rabbits half-buried in the colour, easy to miss on a first look. Baptism, childhood, midlife, death, all of it running alongside the natural world rather than above it or outside it.

Denny still works the way glaziers worked centuries ago with mouth-blown glass - the same method used in glass that’s survived from the 14th century. The colour, though, is entirely his own. Critics have compared his landscapes to Samuel Palmer, and standing there, I understood exactly why.

Faith can be a difficult subject to grapple with in today’s world. But I find that with light, colour, the natural world and ordinary people living their lives as best as they can, we can reach it most closely.

My very first impression of Bucharest was not great — Ceaușescu’s grim tower blocks shouldering up next to s*x shops, th...
16/07/2026

My very first impression of Bucharest was not great — Ceaușescu’s grim tower blocks shouldering up next to s*x shops, the odd crumbling Belle Époque façade caught awkwardly in between.

But quickly we stumbled on Stavropoleos, tucked into a small courtyard just off the old town — WHAT a surprise.

The music playing on this post is the chanting of the monastery’s own psaltic choir.

The monastery was founded in 1724 by a Greek monk, Ioanichie Stratonikeas, and the church is one of the finest surviving examples of Brâncovenesc style, the distinctive Romanian blend of Byzantine structure with Ottoman and late Renaissance influence. Most of the frescoes date from the same original 18th-century construction.

Every surface carried some form of decoration - carved stone columns, walls dense with frescoes, a fabulous iconostasis, a highly decorated wooden door, even the door handles were fantastic. It’s a tiny jewel-box building, and it lifted the spirits immediately.

In the room with Raphael, before the crowds arrived. We got in early and quite literally had the place to ourselves. Whe...
13/07/2026

In the room with Raphael, before the crowds arrived. We got in early and quite literally had the place to ourselves. Where were the security guards!? What an experience! These glorious paintings, were created by Raphael between 1508 and 1511 when he was in his mid 20s.

This was Julius II’s private library, and the room only really works when you view it as one work of art, rather than separate paintings. “The School of Athens” faces the “Disputá” — one setting out reasoned truth (Plato and Aristotle debating their way to knowledge), the other Christian truth (the Trinity, the Eucharist, faith received from above). The Pope wanted his library to argue that classical philosophy and Christian revelation weren’t rivals - that Rome could claim both. I can’t think of an earlier pope who commissioned a decorative scheme mounting an argument this explicit, across a whole room, in fresco. And an artist who could execute it so perfectly.

08/07/2026

One of the most special evenings of the past couple of months was my Van Gogh talk with Charles McGlone.

Charles beautiful voice did something extraordinary that night - at the end of my talk he profoundly changed the mood of the evening. The room was absolutely still and I got the sense that something was landing very deeply.

This is why I keep coming back to the combination of art and music. Not as an add on - or extra entertainment. But as two different ways of reaching the same idea — and when they work together, the effect is unlike anything else.

Charles — thank you. It was a privilege to work with you on this.

04/07/2026

There is something about singing together that nothing else quite replicates, and this choral group is the most wonderful fun. The friendships I have made within it are among the most precious I have here in Dubai. We are not perfect, but what we lack in technical prowess we more than make up for in TOTAL JOY. And that joy, it turns out, is very contagious.

We have sung together at seven of my public art history evenings. Each time, the audience responds in a way that I find genuinely moving.

I love my job. I love talking about art and history more than almost anything. But being able to sing about it too makes the whole thing more glorious than I can quite explain.

But I need your help! This choir still does not have a name — I refer to it rather vaguely as the art choir. Help! What should we be called? Drop your suggestions in the comments and we will announce the new name at our next public evening event on Frida Kahlo.
Rxx.
.common

01/07/2026

Working with has transformed my art history events. She has taught me that music doesn’t just accompany an art story. Rather, it unlocks it and gets the feeling into a room in a way that words don’t always manage.

Melissa, thank you for contributing so powerfully to “The Lost Women of Art History”, and for proving to me that musical theatre could indeed carry the weight of five centuries of injustice. As ever, it was a joy.

29/06/2026

Sound on!! Amazing to have this kind of talent at home. Thank you for putting on the most incredible piano concert - what a fantastic way to kick off the weekend.

27/06/2026

Their signatures were scraped off their own paintings.
They were barred from education and ignored for centuries. Last week, with a joyful, full-to-bursting audience in Dubai, we gave them back their voices. Thank you all so much for coming. Xx

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