The Garden Museum director is swimming 50 miles in the Atlantic Ocean The swim from Cornwall to the Isles of Scilly aims to raise £100,000 for the London museum, which is planning shows on Derek Jarman and Lucian Freud | By José Da Silva, The Art Newspaper

The director of London's Garden Museum, Christopher Woodward, is to attempt a 50-mile swim from Cornwall to the Isles of Scilly, off the southwest coast of England, to raise money the museum has lost due to the coronavirus pandemic. Woodward is hoping to raise £100,000 by September, when he is due to attempt the journey. The exact route has apparently not been swum before, although swimmers have crossed the stretch of sea from Cornwall to the Isles of Scilly.

The sponsored swim, beginning at the town of Newlyn in Cornwall and ending on the island of Tresco, was inspired by a sailboat journey made by the British artist and gardener Cedric Morris in 1950. Morris-who was the subject of a show at the Garden Museum in 2018-had lived at an artists' colony in Newlyn in the 1920s and returned to the town to undertake his voyage to the Isles of Scilly after shutting up his art school at Benton End, Suffolk.

"You need a story to inspire you. After a day or two of swimming you are cold and tired and aching," Woodward says. "[The art dealer] Philip Mould was talking about the trip Cedric Morris took from the artists' colony at Newlyn to the gardeners' paradise of Tresco. That caught the imagination."

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