Arkadiusz spent September 2023 in London, staying at the Trust’s Highgate house.

I would like to thank The Robert Anderson Trust and Mr Howard Davies for having me to stay during my London visit. Thanks to the generosity of The Trust I was able to carry out research related to my doctoral thesis, the title of which is: „The beginnings of archaeology and the influence of the ancient world on the formation of landscape residences in Warsaw in the second half of the 18th century”.

In the British Library

I am very grateful for the support and hospitality from the whole organization, which provided me with the opportunity to stay in a beautiful historical house on Highgate Hill. This great location made it easy for me to move around London.

During my stay, I was able to use the rich collections of the British scientific and museum institutions. I was looking for iconographic and archival material connected to relations between Polish aristocrats and their residences, and Britain. And my research ended in success, enabling me to find, for example, letters from King Stanislas Augustus.

I did my research, inter alia, in these institutions: the British Museum, The British Library, The Warburg Institute, Royal Society, Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, Polish Institute and the Museum of Gen. Sikorski, Sir John Soane’s Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum.

I also visited three magnificent English landscape residences: Stowe House, Chiswick House and Kenwood House, finding there a lot of connections between Polish and British mansions with landscape gardens, which will be crucial for my research.

As a curator of the collection in the Museum and Institute of Zoology in the Polish Academy of Sciences I took advantage of the opportunity of staying in London to visit the Natural History Museum, where I discovered a collection of 19th-century letters from Warsaw zoological institutions.

The whole visit to London was very intensive, but also fruitful and enjoyable. Once again I would like to express my gratitude to The Robert Anderson Trust. I feel honoured to have received the scholarship from them. And it was a real pleasure to stay in such a wonderful city as London.