House keeping
This month Historic Royal Palaces opens its newly restored palace at Kew featuring some ambitious interpretive techniques to tell the story of its past inhabitants. Museums Journal brought together some of the leading figures in historic houses and asked them what the future holds for interpretation
Museums Journal: Which historic houses have done a good job recently at communicating with visitors?
Denise Foster: The conservation and interpretation of the Back to Backs in Birmingham was a really good combined effort. Our regional curators and learning people worked well together to create interpretation that brings the property to life. Because it's got that mixture of first-person interpretation as well as the research behind it, I felt it was a very interesting piece of interpretation.
Ruth Taylor: One of the things that we try to do in the trust is to open up the interpretation and not just have us telling the story to the visitors. And I think the Back to Backs do that, it is about sharing interpretation. It's interpreted through a guided tour, which becomes a discussion between the visitors and the guide.
A lot of local people come to the Back to Backs, so they are likely to have had the experience of living in them and you get a sharing of the stories. You learn as much from the visitors as you do from your guides.
Nikola Burdon: Is the sort of feedback that you're getting from visitors then fed into the interpretation of the houses?
RT: Yes, it is. The guides develop the whole time, so they will say, 'Oh, yes, we had a visitor the other week, who told us about this in their house'. It's not a static interpretation.
Lucy Worsley: Kew Palace is our new project. There, it's not about the re-presentation of an historic interior, it has storytelling, and it's about the dark and awful story of the madness of George III as well as being about wonderful Georgian interiors.
You're incredibly lucky to have something like the Back to Backs, because it's my understanding from research into the effectiveness of live interpretation that people like something that's in the more immediate past, that they can talk about with their grandparents, whereas a royal palace is as off-putting and as intimidating as you can get as a building type.
RT: But if the houses are very different, the principles of interpretation are the same, and it's about following those principles and knowing your audiences so that you can find something that hooks them in.
Then it's not such a big leap that they can't actually make a link between their own lives and what they're seeing. It's telling the story of the place, and there are strong stories in a palace just as there are in a miner's cottage.
Three of the winners in the Interpret Britain awards this past year were places that used person-to-person interpretation. Charleston, in Sussex, produced a new guided tour that was all about the domestic life and at Wordsworth House, in Cockermouth they also thought about the servants in the house. So, it's finding those links and having a really strong story.
DF: One of the reasons Wordsworth has been so successful is that mixture of the live interpretation and the room steward approach. At the heart of the house is a working kitchen that is still creating food and filling the house with smells and making the house feel alive, and that's what the visitors are responding to, because it feels like a living and breathing home.
Javier Pes: My feeling is that historic places are often quite bad at giving a sense of history. You never really get a sense of, when something historic happened. Historic houses and other sites have to choose which moment in history to concentrate on - you've got to weigh up what makes people interested.
LW: Kew Palace is an early 17th-century house, with Georgian alterations. You'll first of all go into this little anteroom and it would have made sense to begin with that room by saying: 'This is a 17th-century house, this panelling has been brought here from an even earlier house. This is the start of the chronological story.'
But we're not doing that, we're having this wonderful wax head of George III and there will be a broadcast of sounds including a monologue by George III. And that will be your first experience - you're coming to George III's house in 1804, the period of his occupation, but the chronology of the house is secondary to the feeling that history happened here.
Sarah Staniforth: That's the tantalising thing about so many historic properties - many of them have more than one of those moments and that gives you a huge opportunity for interpreting in different ways at different times. One of the challenges is to keep up interest in houses. If you can refresh the interpretation by telling a different story at a different time, then that is a huge advantage.
NB: Are the more modern properties the link to the more modern audiences? How much cross-property working is there in terms of themes and is that a way of drawing visitors to properties?
RT: We've had a lot of success with new audiences in very traditional historic properties. It's been about going out to audiences and getting them involved. The Untold Story at Kedleston Hall was an HLF-funded project, and the aim was to involve audiences who were local to the property who wouldn't normally visit.
We linked with a group of Asian women local to Kedleston and we found that there were huge resonances between them and the property. The women wrote poems based on their experiences in the museum. It's not just about modern properties having a link; you can make links through the older properties but you have to find the way in to help people, to create meaning for them.
LW: Would you go so far as to say that the point of the interpretation is not to give information but to change people's lives? - which is what I think.
DF: Yes, that's what I think. At its very best, it has that ability to transform.
Emma Carver: There was a project involving three of our properties last year looking at audiences who visit country houses. What it demonstrated is that we have some very unimaginative answers, which to me means that people are not being challenged and are just not really engaged with the property.
I thought that was very revealing, and a real laying down the gauntlet for us and the other house owners, to think about how to involve people and how to engage them in the story of those big houses.
It wasn't that they hadn't had a nice time, it's just that intellectually they had not registered the experience at all. The big country house has really got to have a complete overhaul in terms of how it is presented to the visitor.
DF: I think you're right. The vast majority of visitors at a trust property on a traditional weekend are there for a nice time. They're not there to have transformative experiences.
RT: We did a piece of research where we asked people whether they'd come to learn anything, and we found that 7 per cent came wanting to learn something. So, they were basically there for a nice day out. But when we did the exit interviews and asked them what they'd learned, 78 per cent said they'd learned something. So, in fact, we are transforming their lives.
DF: The West Midlands had a project called Whose Story?, which was specifically set up to engage with black and minority ethnic communities. We've now got some hard evidence which backs up the idea that people will come when they see themselves or parts of their
heritage reflected in your offer. If you are only interpreting a particular aspect of history that excludes everybody else, then your visitor profile will not change and will not expand.
EC: The biggest inroads at the moment are through events that are reaching audiences who would not normally come in. It's all project-based. The next stage is to build on that for what we're presenting to the general visitor and try to broaden their horizons as well.
DF: We need to move away from that project-based approach, which is funding-led. With Whose Story? the really big challenge is keeping the links that we've made and the expectations that we've created at those properties going. And that's what we're looking at - how to build on them and maintain them so that people do feel a long-term connection with the place, that they will then pass on to their friends and colleagues and family.
JP: We're talking about the atmosphere that these places have and often if you museum-ify it, you kill it. The great strength of these places is that there's a sense of history. But what's always a disappointment is when you get the same old stories being told: 'This is the kitchen, this is the dining room, this is the bedroom…'
LW: Sometimes you've got to have the confidence to say: 'Right, we did the conservation plan, we did all of that research and this is the bit we're going to concentrate on.'
SS: We have the conservation plan, which is, in the opinion of the experts, what is architecturally, artistically and historically significant. And then we have the statement of significance, which is built up with community consultation.
So, one of the answers about how you continue to engage new audiences that have been identified through projects is that they participate in the process of identifying the significance of the property. Because they will very often find different significances, maybe something really obvious that the experts wouldn't spot.
RT: Going back to Javier's point about, 'And it's another bedroom, it's another kitchen'. I think it's because, in the past, historic houses have been interpreted from one perspective and actually what this is, is multiple perspectives. This is where you actually want the local person's view on what the house was to them when they were living down the road.
EC: Can you have too many houses? Is there a saturation point? There are now so many historic houses open to the
public and presenting themselves as an experience to visitors. Are there that many different permutations in terms of the experience?
LW: I wouldn't say that there are too many houses. I think it's just an encouragement to us to do more extreme, different things with them to make them contrast more. The experience isn't just about learning some historical facts. It's about spending time with your family, interacting with your friends, sitting down, eating, drinking, reading, learning stuff that's not so place-specific that there isn't room for a whole lot more of it.
SS: I have to say I'm worried because there is a lot of competition around. Four out of five National Trust properties operate at a loss and the reason that we survive is because of our membership. We have to be realistic about what the future will bring, and the future will make it more difficult for people to get to historic houses in the countryside, because people won't be able to afford to get there in their cars.
So we are going to have to make some hard choices about how we use these houses in the future. And it may be that opening to the public is not the answer. It could be an educational use, a learning use, but not the convention of opening the doors and expecting people to come.
NB: I think what's been said about involving the community and reassessing the purpose of some historic houses, sounds really exciting. It might not be an easy ride and it will create tensions and there's going to be debate, but when you have debate it gives people more ownership.
Something that museums have done quite well recently is acted as a forum in which to have these challenging, difficult debates and I think that's perhaps something historic houses could learn from.
SS: An awful lot of our historic houses are museums, but there are differences and I think it's just worth pinning down what the differences are. For me, the difference is that the building is our largest artefact and on the whole, in museums, it's about collections and the building is there to service the collection.
Historic houses have a collection in the context, very often, for which it was made or collected. And furthermore, that building is in its garden and it's part of the wider landscape and that whole ensemble is a very, very important aspect of interpretation in historic houses.
LW: Another aspect is that they were peopled and it's the lives of the people that were in the houses and the events that happened there. We have this theory called, 'the exact spot theory', where people can go and see the exact spots where something happened and that's something that is completely different from a museum.
Denise Foster: The conservation and interpretation of the Back to Backs in Birmingham was a really good combined effort. Our regional curators and learning people worked well together to create interpretation that brings the property to life. Because it's got that mixture of first-person interpretation as well as the research behind it, I felt it was a very interesting piece of interpretation.
Ruth Taylor: One of the things that we try to do in the trust is to open up the interpretation and not just have us telling the story to the visitors. And I think the Back to Backs do that, it is about sharing interpretation. It's interpreted through a guided tour, which becomes a discussion between the visitors and the guide.
A lot of local people come to the Back to Backs, so they are likely to have had the experience of living in them and you get a sharing of the stories. You learn as much from the visitors as you do from your guides.
Nikola Burdon: Is the sort of feedback that you're getting from visitors then fed into the interpretation of the houses?
RT: Yes, it is. The guides develop the whole time, so they will say, 'Oh, yes, we had a visitor the other week, who told us about this in their house'. It's not a static interpretation.
Lucy Worsley: Kew Palace is our new project. There, it's not about the re-presentation of an historic interior, it has storytelling, and it's about the dark and awful story of the madness of George III as well as being about wonderful Georgian interiors.
You're incredibly lucky to have something like the Back to Backs, because it's my understanding from research into the effectiveness of live interpretation that people like something that's in the more immediate past, that they can talk about with their grandparents, whereas a royal palace is as off-putting and as intimidating as you can get as a building type.
RT: But if the houses are very different, the principles of interpretation are the same, and it's about following those principles and knowing your audiences so that you can find something that hooks them in.
Then it's not such a big leap that they can't actually make a link between their own lives and what they're seeing. It's telling the story of the place, and there are strong stories in a palace just as there are in a miner's cottage.
Three of the winners in the Interpret Britain awards this past year were places that used person-to-person interpretation. Charleston, in Sussex, produced a new guided tour that was all about the domestic life and at Wordsworth House, in Cockermouth they also thought about the servants in the house. So, it's finding those links and having a really strong story.
DF: One of the reasons Wordsworth has been so successful is that mixture of the live interpretation and the room steward approach. At the heart of the house is a working kitchen that is still creating food and filling the house with smells and making the house feel alive, and that's what the visitors are responding to, because it feels like a living and breathing home.
Javier Pes: My feeling is that historic places are often quite bad at giving a sense of history. You never really get a sense of, when something historic happened. Historic houses and other sites have to choose which moment in history to concentrate on - you've got to weigh up what makes people interested.
LW: Kew Palace is an early 17th-century house, with Georgian alterations. You'll first of all go into this little anteroom and it would have made sense to begin with that room by saying: 'This is a 17th-century house, this panelling has been brought here from an even earlier house. This is the start of the chronological story.'
But we're not doing that, we're having this wonderful wax head of George III and there will be a broadcast of sounds including a monologue by George III. And that will be your first experience - you're coming to George III's house in 1804, the period of his occupation, but the chronology of the house is secondary to the feeling that history happened here.
Sarah Staniforth: That's the tantalising thing about so many historic properties - many of them have more than one of those moments and that gives you a huge opportunity for interpreting in different ways at different times. One of the challenges is to keep up interest in houses. If you can refresh the interpretation by telling a different story at a different time, then that is a huge advantage.
NB: Are the more modern properties the link to the more modern audiences? How much cross-property working is there in terms of themes and is that a way of drawing visitors to properties?
RT: We've had a lot of success with new audiences in very traditional historic properties. It's been about going out to audiences and getting them involved. The Untold Story at Kedleston Hall was an HLF-funded project, and the aim was to involve audiences who were local to the property who wouldn't normally visit.
We linked with a group of Asian women local to Kedleston and we found that there were huge resonances between them and the property. The women wrote poems based on their experiences in the museum. It's not just about modern properties having a link; you can make links through the older properties but you have to find the way in to help people, to create meaning for them.
LW: Would you go so far as to say that the point of the interpretation is not to give information but to change people's lives? - which is what I think.
DF: Yes, that's what I think. At its very best, it has that ability to transform.
Emma Carver: There was a project involving three of our properties last year looking at audiences who visit country houses. What it demonstrated is that we have some very unimaginative answers, which to me means that people are not being challenged and are just not really engaged with the property.
I thought that was very revealing, and a real laying down the gauntlet for us and the other house owners, to think about how to involve people and how to engage them in the story of those big houses.
It wasn't that they hadn't had a nice time, it's just that intellectually they had not registered the experience at all. The big country house has really got to have a complete overhaul in terms of how it is presented to the visitor.
DF: I think you're right. The vast majority of visitors at a trust property on a traditional weekend are there for a nice time. They're not there to have transformative experiences.
RT: We did a piece of research where we asked people whether they'd come to learn anything, and we found that 7 per cent came wanting to learn something. So, they were basically there for a nice day out. But when we did the exit interviews and asked them what they'd learned, 78 per cent said they'd learned something. So, in fact, we are transforming their lives.
DF: The West Midlands had a project called Whose Story?, which was specifically set up to engage with black and minority ethnic communities. We've now got some hard evidence which backs up the idea that people will come when they see themselves or parts of their
heritage reflected in your offer. If you are only interpreting a particular aspect of history that excludes everybody else, then your visitor profile will not change and will not expand.
EC: The biggest inroads at the moment are through events that are reaching audiences who would not normally come in. It's all project-based. The next stage is to build on that for what we're presenting to the general visitor and try to broaden their horizons as well.
DF: We need to move away from that project-based approach, which is funding-led. With Whose Story? the really big challenge is keeping the links that we've made and the expectations that we've created at those properties going. And that's what we're looking at - how to build on them and maintain them so that people do feel a long-term connection with the place, that they will then pass on to their friends and colleagues and family.
JP: We're talking about the atmosphere that these places have and often if you museum-ify it, you kill it. The great strength of these places is that there's a sense of history. But what's always a disappointment is when you get the same old stories being told: 'This is the kitchen, this is the dining room, this is the bedroom…'
LW: Sometimes you've got to have the confidence to say: 'Right, we did the conservation plan, we did all of that research and this is the bit we're going to concentrate on.'
SS: We have the conservation plan, which is, in the opinion of the experts, what is architecturally, artistically and historically significant. And then we have the statement of significance, which is built up with community consultation.
So, one of the answers about how you continue to engage new audiences that have been identified through projects is that they participate in the process of identifying the significance of the property. Because they will very often find different significances, maybe something really obvious that the experts wouldn't spot.
RT: Going back to Javier's point about, 'And it's another bedroom, it's another kitchen'. I think it's because, in the past, historic houses have been interpreted from one perspective and actually what this is, is multiple perspectives. This is where you actually want the local person's view on what the house was to them when they were living down the road.
EC: Can you have too many houses? Is there a saturation point? There are now so many historic houses open to the
public and presenting themselves as an experience to visitors. Are there that many different permutations in terms of the experience?
LW: I wouldn't say that there are too many houses. I think it's just an encouragement to us to do more extreme, different things with them to make them contrast more. The experience isn't just about learning some historical facts. It's about spending time with your family, interacting with your friends, sitting down, eating, drinking, reading, learning stuff that's not so place-specific that there isn't room for a whole lot more of it.
SS: I have to say I'm worried because there is a lot of competition around. Four out of five National Trust properties operate at a loss and the reason that we survive is because of our membership. We have to be realistic about what the future will bring, and the future will make it more difficult for people to get to historic houses in the countryside, because people won't be able to afford to get there in their cars.
So we are going to have to make some hard choices about how we use these houses in the future. And it may be that opening to the public is not the answer. It could be an educational use, a learning use, but not the convention of opening the doors and expecting people to come.
NB: I think what's been said about involving the community and reassessing the purpose of some historic houses, sounds really exciting. It might not be an easy ride and it will create tensions and there's going to be debate, but when you have debate it gives people more ownership.
Something that museums have done quite well recently is acted as a forum in which to have these challenging, difficult debates and I think that's perhaps something historic houses could learn from.
SS: An awful lot of our historic houses are museums, but there are differences and I think it's just worth pinning down what the differences are. For me, the difference is that the building is our largest artefact and on the whole, in museums, it's about collections and the building is there to service the collection.
Historic houses have a collection in the context, very often, for which it was made or collected. And furthermore, that building is in its garden and it's part of the wider landscape and that whole ensemble is a very, very important aspect of interpretation in historic houses.
LW: Another aspect is that they were peopled and it's the lives of the people that were in the houses and the events that happened there. We have this theory called, 'the exact spot theory', where people can go and see the exact spots where something happened and that's something that is completely different from a museum.