Profile: Gareth Williams
There is a fine balance to be achieved when your visitors include schoolchildren and heads of state
Gareth Williams is curator and head of learning at the Weston Park Foundation in Staffordshire, which looks after the ancestral home of the Earls of Bradford.
Home to works by – among others – Van Dyck, Constable, Stubbs and Holbein, the estate is also one of the dual hosts of the annual V Festival and was the location for the 1998 G8 Summit, making it one of the very few places to have welcomed Russian president Boris Yeltsin and the rock band the Longpigs.
Are you Downton in disguise?
This house still operates in a Downton-esque kind of way and we offer tours of upstairs and downstairs. There are 28 bedrooms, which is must be quite unusual for an Accredited museum.
One bedroom is 1770s with a four-poster bed probably by Gillows of Lancaster but all are furnished with objects from the collection. Funnily enough, people from Masterpiece, the TV programme’s American backers, have stayed here.
How do you stop folk knocking things over?
It’s better to find ways of doing things rather than just saying no. Thousands of schoolchildren visit each year and they are the next generation of customers whose income we will rely on so we give them second world war experiences and wildlife walks in relevant areas of the property.
At the same time, we may have a conference going on so we are mindful that the business folk may not want to hear excited kids charging up and down.
You regularly pop over to the east coast of the US to talk about your posh house in an English accent. Is that a tough audience?
There’s a genuine feeling over there that England is stuck in a costume drama time-warp and that impression turns into something of a blinkered mentality when people are shipped over on tours.
Organisers will say things like: “Sort out the prettiest route as we don’t want to them to drive past any factories.” We temper that with a sense of reality when they arrive.
Speaking of which, you used to work at Sotheby’s.
I went straight from university to work in Bond Street at what was called the pays ledger during a very interesting time when the late Robert Maxwell’s pension issues were demanding money.
Later, I took part in the sales of the Leverhulme collection at Thornton Manor on the Wirral – still a record for a house sale – and the James Watt collection, which was sold to pay a tax bill.
After a day’s work, do you go home to a stately pile or a box on a modern estate?
An 1879 mock black-and-white model dairy in Shrewsbury. It’s a work in progress. There are days when, to be honest, I’d really like all mod cons.
Home to works by – among others – Van Dyck, Constable, Stubbs and Holbein, the estate is also one of the dual hosts of the annual V Festival and was the location for the 1998 G8 Summit, making it one of the very few places to have welcomed Russian president Boris Yeltsin and the rock band the Longpigs.
Are you Downton in disguise?
This house still operates in a Downton-esque kind of way and we offer tours of upstairs and downstairs. There are 28 bedrooms, which is must be quite unusual for an Accredited museum.
One bedroom is 1770s with a four-poster bed probably by Gillows of Lancaster but all are furnished with objects from the collection. Funnily enough, people from Masterpiece, the TV programme’s American backers, have stayed here.
How do you stop folk knocking things over?
It’s better to find ways of doing things rather than just saying no. Thousands of schoolchildren visit each year and they are the next generation of customers whose income we will rely on so we give them second world war experiences and wildlife walks in relevant areas of the property.
At the same time, we may have a conference going on so we are mindful that the business folk may not want to hear excited kids charging up and down.
You regularly pop over to the east coast of the US to talk about your posh house in an English accent. Is that a tough audience?
There’s a genuine feeling over there that England is stuck in a costume drama time-warp and that impression turns into something of a blinkered mentality when people are shipped over on tours.
Organisers will say things like: “Sort out the prettiest route as we don’t want to them to drive past any factories.” We temper that with a sense of reality when they arrive.
Speaking of which, you used to work at Sotheby’s.
I went straight from university to work in Bond Street at what was called the pays ledger during a very interesting time when the late Robert Maxwell’s pension issues were demanding money.
Later, I took part in the sales of the Leverhulme collection at Thornton Manor on the Wirral – still a record for a house sale – and the James Watt collection, which was sold to pay a tax bill.
After a day’s work, do you go home to a stately pile or a box on a modern estate?
An 1879 mock black-and-white model dairy in Shrewsbury. It’s a work in progress. There are days when, to be honest, I’d really like all mod cons.