About the Owners
Our backgrounds
Paul and Paul, share their creative point of view with guests by distributing a carefully considered collection of contemporary art and found objects throughout Woolmarket House. Paul Barratt is a curator having trained in London at Goldsmith’s College, London University and the Royal College of Art. Paul worked for a number of contemporary art galleries in London (Antony D’Offay Gallery. Lisson Gallery), and New York (Gladstone Gallery) and as an independent curator in London. Paul Vater ran his own successful design agency, based in Ladbroke Grove, West London, specialising in corporate branding for 25 years. The agency had arts and cultural sector clients, local and national government clients, marketing agencies and several influential e-commerce websites. He still designs e-commerce websites and digital design for ‘in-house’ projects. Paul and Paul currently organise pop-up exhibitions showcasing contemporary art and craft by artists and makers from across East Anglia. Click here on the link to find out more about their art activities: Contemporary and Country.
PAST RESIDENTS of WOOLMARKET HOUSE GUSTAV METZGER (1926 - 2017)
‘Everything I know about activism, I learned in King’s Lynn’
Gustav Metzger was an artist and activist whose practice was directly targeted against environmental destruction. He lived at Woolmarket House for 8 years. It was from here that he helped to campaign to save the cottages of the North End fishing community from development. While he felt that he failed, in that most of Pilot St was demolished to make way for what is now John Kennedy Road, nevertheless the campaign aroused his spirit as an activist. And two of the cottages he managed to save have since become the celebrated True’s Yard Museum.
Sensitive to heritage, around that time he also organised an exhibition Treasures from East Anglian Churches which has been sad to have inspired his sensitivity to the power of destruction, as so many of the artefacts had been damaged.
A launch event for one of his last art projects called “Remember Nature” took place at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and at art schools nationwide on 4 November, 2015. Remember Nature invited all artists to address the crisis within nature. He intended to bring awareness to the damages that continue to devastate our natural world. Remember Nature was organised by Metzger and curators to be a designated day of action. November 2025 marks its 10th anniversary, in which events are presented in numerous galleries and museums and artist groups across the country.
“The art, architecture and design world needs to take a stand against the ongoing erasure of species – even where there is little chance of ultimate success. It is our privilege and our duty to be at the forefront of the struggle. There is no choice but to follow the path of ethics into aesthetics. We live in societies suffocating in waste. Our task is to remind people of the richness and complexity in nature; to protect nature as far as we can and by doing so art will enter new territories that are inherently creative.”
Gustav Metzger, 2015