Art galleries in Southend-on-Sea

Galleries are best taken slowly. Southend-on-Sea, Essex has 17 mapped right now. That's 17 galleries mapped around Southend-on-Sea. The exhibition schedule matters more than the count: a small gallery with a great current show beats a big one between exhibitions. Opening nights are the cheat code — free entry, the artists in the room, and a crowd that actually wants to talk about the work.

This guide covers every art gallery we could verify in and around Southend-on-Sea (within about 40 km), built from OpenStreetMap's community-maintained data. Names you'll run into include Medway ArtBox and Francesca Mafffeo Gallery, plus Old Leigh Studios. If a gallery's missing from Southend-on-Sea's list, it probably just hasn't been mapped yet.

The Southend-on-Sea gallery lineup

17 mapped within about 40 km:

What the map tells us about art galleries in Southend-on-Sea

3 of the 17 list their opening hours on the map, which is genuinely useful — galleries keep proper public hours, so plan around the listed times.

4 have websites listed. That's where the current exhibition is announced — the one thing worth checking before you visit.

4 galleries list websites — that's where the current exhibition is announced, and it's the one thing worth checking before you visit.

The Southend-on-Sea gallery walk

Making a day of it in Southend-on-Sea? Work this order: Medway ArtBox, Francesca Mafffeo Gallery, Old Leigh Studios, Lynn Tait Gallery at the Old Foundart, The Alchemy Gallery, Peter Blake Gallery, Beecroft Art Gallery on Victoria Avenue, and Former Beecroft Art Gallery. That's the gallery walk in one sensible loop, no backtracking. 9 more are listed below.

Gallery tips for Southend-on-Sea

How the regulars do Southend-on-Sea's galleries:

• Take the long way through at Medway ArtBox. Galleries reward slow looking. One extra lap always reveals something the first pass missed.
• Ask about the artists at Francesca Mafffeo Gallery. Local, emerging, mid-career — the gallerist can tell you who's who and why this show matters.
• The bookshop corner is curated. Gallery bookshops stock the art books the big stores don't. Worth ten minutes on the way out.
• Check the gift shop. Prints, artist books, and the occasional affordable original. The gift shop funds the programming.

Good to know

We searched about 40 km around Southend-on-Sea — that covers the town itself plus the surrounding communities you'd reasonably drive to. Listings come from OpenStreetMap, mapped by local volunteers, so a brand-new art gallery in Southend-on-Sea can take a while to appear. The 17 above are only as current as the community map. A art gallery that's shut, or a new one nobody's added yet, gets fixed with a single OpenStreetMap edit.

We don't review exhibitions — shows change too fast. What we list is the where: real galleries, verified by real mappers.

If you run one of the 17 listed here and something's wrong — a closure, a move, new hours — the fix is the same: update the shop on OpenStreetMap and the correction flows through to this page on the next daily refresh.