Murder, romance and lots of juicy gossip – fictional historic houses such as the one portrayed in television drama Downton Abbey seem to have it all. But what about the real homes of the rich and privileged?
For many years, the visitor experience has been deadened by an atmosphere of hushed reverence, off-putting red ropes, and pine cones preventing visitors sitting on velveted seats. But approaches to interpreting properties have moved on, with more emphasis on meaningful engagement with the contents and collections of houses and, crucially, the lives of their owners and occupants.
There is no doubt that the wealth on show in lots of properties can be overwhelming for visitors. But many organisations, owners and curators understand this and are becoming much better at telling the fascinating stories that historic houses hold.
“To an extent, art history has been replaced by social history,” says Christopher Ridgway, the curator at Castle Howard and chair of the Yorkshire Country House Partnership. “But different perspectives are not mutually exclusive,” he adds. “Recreational time is precious and competition is fierce, so we have to try to offer fresh, stimulating, unstuffy ideas and keep constantly attuned to this.”
These changes have not happened overnight, and are often the result of staff in historic houses working together closely to produce a more coherent experience based on constant evaluation of what works and what doesn’t.
One of the major challenges is that historic houses are restricted in ways that many museums and art galleries are not. The structure and fabric of the property, the landscape and setting, the interiors, furnishings and collections of the house – these all have to work together without being substantially altered.
But historic houses also have advantages. They were or are homes, imbued with the accumulated lives, treasures and often personal belongings of their occupants. This is fundamental to the visit. And the quality of the visitor experience is today central to the thinking of most owners of historic houses that are open to the public.
Shaped by the past
Interpretation is now expected to reflect contemporary concerns, underpinned by rigorous research. Many of the families behind these houses made their money directly through slave-based economies. Much more is known about these links now, and this is made explicit. Unsavoury stories are not always brushed under the carpet but aired among the portraits and pots.
The National Trust has built on the success of its Trust New Art partnership with Arts Council England, where contemporary artists are commissioned to make interventions in the historic settings.
“Visitors have responded well to these projects, and the National Trust is now using this more interpretative approach in its cyclical programming as well as for special projects,” says Sandy Nairne, the former director of London’s National Portrait Gallery, who is a trust board member.
Choosing a specific time period or a single character can offer creative opportunities to use immersive or live interpretation. For example, the re-creation of a world war two merchant bank at Upton House near Stratford-upon-Avon and a second world war military hospital at Dunham Massey in Cheshire, both National Trust properties, highlighted only a short time in the history of each house, but they engaged audiences in more active ways than a traditional, more passive visit. “It was the imaginative and theatrical elements that drew people in,” says Nairne.
Activities aimed at children have increased drastically at National Trust properties over the past 10 to 15 years.
“The children’s gallery at Beningbrough Hall near York explored notions of royal portraiture in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery,” Nairne says. “And Wimpole House, the largest house in Cambridgeshire, won a Europa Nostra award in 2016 for the restoration of an 18th-century gothic folly. This, along with other features such as a fabulous children’s farm, is drawing people in through the landscape.”
But are projects such as these in danger of dumbing down the interpretation of historic houses? Nairne does not believe so.
“On the contrary, they have led to more complex displays and deeper narratives because they are built around thorough research and scholarship,” he says.
Despite the efforts that historic houses are making to engage visitors, many people still enjoy repeat trips to the grounds of a stately home but don’t venture inside. Cost, time and access may be barriers to entry, particularly for families, but it is also likely that visitors are bewildered or even bored by the embarrassment of riches on display inside the house itself.
At English Heritage, a number of properties are addressing this with distinctive interpretation methods, such as recreating Charles Darwin’s bedroom at Down House in Kent, from which visitors can look down on the rather unkempt garden where the naturalist conducted his experiments.
Anna Eavis, the curatorial director at English Heritage, says that visitors do respond to a more focused perspective. “Over a number of years we’ve become more audience-centred,” she says. “We have always had an ethos of multidisciplinary working because of the many different types of sites we have, but now the research is more integrated with the interpretation. We are really digging into the way visitors are responding because it helps inform every new scheme, and it’s hugely encouraging that our families work is hitting the mark.”
A richer picture
Visitor numbers at Audley End, an English Heritage site in Essex, have increased since the Victorian nursery was recreated.
“It’s a popular site but families were generally staying in the grounds, even though the entry price covered both house and grounds,” Eavis says. “Now, 85% of families go into the house. Curatorially, the nursery is underpinned by rigorous research into the period wallpapers, furniture and so on, but we’ve also brought it to life with imaginative play and stories of the children who lived there.”
At Eltham Palace in London, another English Heritage property, curators have been uncovering a map room where the millionairess Virginia Courtauld planned her travels with her husband on their luxury yacht in the 1930s.
“We have kept the process transparent, so people can see the maps under the layers of paint and wallpaper, with her quirky drawings of figures in national costume,” says Eavis. “It’s a very personal space, and part of the fascination is in enabling the visitor to share in the process of discovery.
“Whether it’s re-creation or representation, the starting point is always the specific history of the site,” Eavis says. “It’s crucial that we have curatorial credibility and that we are confident about the evidence. But it can be a mixture of both, sometimes in one property. For example, the wartime bunker at Eltham is a re-creation, but the map room has the authentic patina of age. Both can work, and both are true to the history of the place.”
Marble Hill House in Twickenham, meanwhile, is being redeveloped by English Heritage to tell the story of a building that was built in the 1720s for Henrietta Howard, a courtier and mistress of George II before he became king.
“It’s a great opportunity to tell the story of an extraordinary woman who was able to commission and finance this neo-Palladian villa on the Thames as her own retreat, with design advice from a raft of celebrated friends including the poet Alexander Pope,” says Eavis.
“She had shares in the South Sea Company and other companies with interests in the transatlantic slave trade, as did later owners of Marble Hill. It’s perhaps the first time where we are thinking truly in the round, because Marble Hill offers multiple historical narratives including slavery, disability (Howard was deaf), consumption and the role of women in early 18th-century society.”
Collaborations such as the Yorkshire Country House Partnership mean that interlinked projects can take the form of simultaneous exhibitions across several different properties. In the pipeline for 2019, for example, is an exhibition about travel and the country house, offering different aspects of the theme across several member properties.
“Picking themes and topics that will resonate with a wider public as well as reflecting the richness of the holdings is crucial,” says Ridgway, at the Yorkshire Country House Partnership. “Travel has great potential because everybody experiences it and it provokes many narrative strands. For example, how was the stone for the building work transported to Yorkshire before the railway age? How did families get their furniture from London to Yorkshire? How comfortable was a ride in a coach in the 1820s? What was the medical condition of railway spine? These are all questions that we can explore with archival sources and material from our collections.
“Historic houses tell the histories of the aristocracy, it’s true, but these people kept records, journals and letters and threw virtually nothing away,” says Ridgway. “We are building up a thicker, richer picture all the time with multiple trajectories, but we need to be sure there’s a public appetite and we have to continually judge what works. Visitors could come away bemused or befuddled if we are not careful and we have to find a way through that.”
It is often the smallest, most prosaic items, those with a negligible value, that tell the most powerful stories. For example, Yorkshire Country House Partnership’s world war one project Duty Calls: The Country House in Time of War, which won a Hudson’s Heritage Award for 2015, used modest sources of material such as medals and cap badges.
“Research can bring powerful narratives to the fore,” says Ridgway. “A prisoner-of-war diary written by one of our estate workers had visitors lingering at a cabinet. It might have been a bit old fashioned in display terms but it’s these human glimpses into the past – the very ‘lived-in’ quality of the house – that touch a wider public.”
Its 12-year £32.7m masterplan is due for completion later this year. This is mainly a structural building project focusing on essential exterior repairs and maintenance. But it has also involved the redesign and reinterpretation of parts of the interiors to encourage more visitors to come into the house as well as enjoy the extensive gardens and estate parkland.
New spaces and rooms have been opened up, including a dedicated cabinet room for the family’s important old master drawings, many of which have not been on display for a century.
Visitor flow will also be improved, but the main emphasis over the past five years has been to develop a much stronger exhibition programme to help Chatsworth reach out to new audiences. Make Yourself Comfortable in 2015, for example, consisted of a curated selection of seating specific to each room, including new commissions, loans and existing chairs in the Devonshire Collection, encouraging people to sit down and enjoy a different perspective of the house.
Kate Brindley was recently appointed the director of collections and exhibitions to build on this new approach. “My role is to raise the profile of Chatsworth’s rich and important collections, but also to improve the visitor experience,” says Brindley, who has moved to the historic house from the Arnolfini arts centre in Bristol.
The first show of 2017 is the biggest to date. House Style (25 March to 22 October 2017) is an ambitious fashion exhibition curated with the close involvement of the family, with costumes drawn from Chatsworth’s historic and contemporary collections as well as other sources. Displayed throughout the house, costumes are shown in their original setting so that visitors can see them in the context of the family’s story.
Unlike museums, historic houses rarely use text labels, but there is often a hunger for more information, says Brindley.
“It’s about how you keep the balance between the ambience of a room and information for those who want to look deeper into an exhibit or theme,” she says. “Part of our constant debate as a historic house is how people can get more out of particular items. It’s a different approach, where we are looking at the objects in their environment and finding ways to mediate them. There are myriad ways to do this – events, audio, live interpretation. What’s important is how we diversify and work with new audiences. It’s a huge and exciting opportunity.”
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance writer and editor
For many years, the visitor experience has been deadened by an atmosphere of hushed reverence, off-putting red ropes, and pine cones preventing visitors sitting on velveted seats. But approaches to interpreting properties have moved on, with more emphasis on meaningful engagement with the contents and collections of houses and, crucially, the lives of their owners and occupants.
There is no doubt that the wealth on show in lots of properties can be overwhelming for visitors. But many organisations, owners and curators understand this and are becoming much better at telling the fascinating stories that historic houses hold.
“To an extent, art history has been replaced by social history,” says Christopher Ridgway, the curator at Castle Howard and chair of the Yorkshire Country House Partnership. “But different perspectives are not mutually exclusive,” he adds. “Recreational time is precious and competition is fierce, so we have to try to offer fresh, stimulating, unstuffy ideas and keep constantly attuned to this.”
These changes have not happened overnight, and are often the result of staff in historic houses working together closely to produce a more coherent experience based on constant evaluation of what works and what doesn’t.
One of the major challenges is that historic houses are restricted in ways that many museums and art galleries are not. The structure and fabric of the property, the landscape and setting, the interiors, furnishings and collections of the house – these all have to work together without being substantially altered.
But historic houses also have advantages. They were or are homes, imbued with the accumulated lives, treasures and often personal belongings of their occupants. This is fundamental to the visit. And the quality of the visitor experience is today central to the thinking of most owners of historic houses that are open to the public.
Recreational time is precious and competition is fierce, so we have to try to offer fresh, stimulating, unstuffy ideas"
Shaped by the past
Interpretation is now expected to reflect contemporary concerns, underpinned by rigorous research. Many of the families behind these houses made their money directly through slave-based economies. Much more is known about these links now, and this is made explicit. Unsavoury stories are not always brushed under the carpet but aired among the portraits and pots.
The National Trust has built on the success of its Trust New Art partnership with Arts Council England, where contemporary artists are commissioned to make interventions in the historic settings.
“Visitors have responded well to these projects, and the National Trust is now using this more interpretative approach in its cyclical programming as well as for special projects,” says Sandy Nairne, the former director of London’s National Portrait Gallery, who is a trust board member.
Choosing a specific time period or a single character can offer creative opportunities to use immersive or live interpretation. For example, the re-creation of a world war two merchant bank at Upton House near Stratford-upon-Avon and a second world war military hospital at Dunham Massey in Cheshire, both National Trust properties, highlighted only a short time in the history of each house, but they engaged audiences in more active ways than a traditional, more passive visit. “It was the imaginative and theatrical elements that drew people in,” says Nairne.
Activities aimed at children have increased drastically at National Trust properties over the past 10 to 15 years.
“The children’s gallery at Beningbrough Hall near York explored notions of royal portraiture in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery,” Nairne says. “And Wimpole House, the largest house in Cambridgeshire, won a Europa Nostra award in 2016 for the restoration of an 18th-century gothic folly. This, along with other features such as a fabulous children’s farm, is drawing people in through the landscape.”
But are projects such as these in danger of dumbing down the interpretation of historic houses? Nairne does not believe so.
“On the contrary, they have led to more complex displays and deeper narratives because they are built around thorough research and scholarship,” he says.
Despite the efforts that historic houses are making to engage visitors, many people still enjoy repeat trips to the grounds of a stately home but don’t venture inside. Cost, time and access may be barriers to entry, particularly for families, but it is also likely that visitors are bewildered or even bored by the embarrassment of riches on display inside the house itself.
At English Heritage, a number of properties are addressing this with distinctive interpretation methods, such as recreating Charles Darwin’s bedroom at Down House in Kent, from which visitors can look down on the rather unkempt garden where the naturalist conducted his experiments.
Anna Eavis, the curatorial director at English Heritage, says that visitors do respond to a more focused perspective. “Over a number of years we’ve become more audience-centred,” she says. “We have always had an ethos of multidisciplinary working because of the many different types of sites we have, but now the research is more integrated with the interpretation. We are really digging into the way visitors are responding because it helps inform every new scheme, and it’s hugely encouraging that our families work is hitting the mark.”
A richer picture
Visitor numbers at Audley End, an English Heritage site in Essex, have increased since the Victorian nursery was recreated.
“It’s a popular site but families were generally staying in the grounds, even though the entry price covered both house and grounds,” Eavis says. “Now, 85% of families go into the house. Curatorially, the nursery is underpinned by rigorous research into the period wallpapers, furniture and so on, but we’ve also brought it to life with imaginative play and stories of the children who lived there.”
At Eltham Palace in London, another English Heritage property, curators have been uncovering a map room where the millionairess Virginia Courtauld planned her travels with her husband on their luxury yacht in the 1930s.
“We have kept the process transparent, so people can see the maps under the layers of paint and wallpaper, with her quirky drawings of figures in national costume,” says Eavis. “It’s a very personal space, and part of the fascination is in enabling the visitor to share in the process of discovery.
“Whether it’s re-creation or representation, the starting point is always the specific history of the site,” Eavis says. “It’s crucial that we have curatorial credibility and that we are confident about the evidence. But it can be a mixture of both, sometimes in one property. For example, the wartime bunker at Eltham is a re-creation, but the map room has the authentic patina of age. Both can work, and both are true to the history of the place.”
Marble Hill House in Twickenham, meanwhile, is being redeveloped by English Heritage to tell the story of a building that was built in the 1720s for Henrietta Howard, a courtier and mistress of George II before he became king.
“It’s a great opportunity to tell the story of an extraordinary woman who was able to commission and finance this neo-Palladian villa on the Thames as her own retreat, with design advice from a raft of celebrated friends including the poet Alexander Pope,” says Eavis.
“She had shares in the South Sea Company and other companies with interests in the transatlantic slave trade, as did later owners of Marble Hill. It’s perhaps the first time where we are thinking truly in the round, because Marble Hill offers multiple historical narratives including slavery, disability (Howard was deaf), consumption and the role of women in early 18th-century society.”
Collaborations such as the Yorkshire Country House Partnership mean that interlinked projects can take the form of simultaneous exhibitions across several different properties. In the pipeline for 2019, for example, is an exhibition about travel and the country house, offering different aspects of the theme across several member properties.
“Picking themes and topics that will resonate with a wider public as well as reflecting the richness of the holdings is crucial,” says Ridgway, at the Yorkshire Country House Partnership. “Travel has great potential because everybody experiences it and it provokes many narrative strands. For example, how was the stone for the building work transported to Yorkshire before the railway age? How did families get their furniture from London to Yorkshire? How comfortable was a ride in a coach in the 1820s? What was the medical condition of railway spine? These are all questions that we can explore with archival sources and material from our collections.
“Historic houses tell the histories of the aristocracy, it’s true, but these people kept records, journals and letters and threw virtually nothing away,” says Ridgway. “We are building up a thicker, richer picture all the time with multiple trajectories, but we need to be sure there’s a public appetite and we have to continually judge what works. Visitors could come away bemused or befuddled if we are not careful and we have to find a way through that.”
It is often the smallest, most prosaic items, those with a negligible value, that tell the most powerful stories. For example, Yorkshire Country House Partnership’s world war one project Duty Calls: The Country House in Time of War, which won a Hudson’s Heritage Award for 2015, used modest sources of material such as medals and cap badges.
“Research can bring powerful narratives to the fore,” says Ridgway. “A prisoner-of-war diary written by one of our estate workers had visitors lingering at a cabinet. It might have been a bit old fashioned in display terms but it’s these human glimpses into the past – the very ‘lived-in’ quality of the house – that touch a wider public.”
Chatsworth makes a fashion statement
Chatsworth in Derbyshire regularly tops the “most visited” lists of historic houses and stately homes. But that doesn’t mean it rests on its gilded laurels. The honey-coloured sandstone home of the Cavendish family – the Dukes and Duchesses of Devonshire – contains important fine art and decorative collections amassed over centuries, and welcomes about 620,000 visitors a year. Its 12-year £32.7m masterplan is due for completion later this year. This is mainly a structural building project focusing on essential exterior repairs and maintenance. But it has also involved the redesign and reinterpretation of parts of the interiors to encourage more visitors to come into the house as well as enjoy the extensive gardens and estate parkland.
New spaces and rooms have been opened up, including a dedicated cabinet room for the family’s important old master drawings, many of which have not been on display for a century.
Visitor flow will also be improved, but the main emphasis over the past five years has been to develop a much stronger exhibition programme to help Chatsworth reach out to new audiences. Make Yourself Comfortable in 2015, for example, consisted of a curated selection of seating specific to each room, including new commissions, loans and existing chairs in the Devonshire Collection, encouraging people to sit down and enjoy a different perspective of the house.
Kate Brindley was recently appointed the director of collections and exhibitions to build on this new approach. “My role is to raise the profile of Chatsworth’s rich and important collections, but also to improve the visitor experience,” says Brindley, who has moved to the historic house from the Arnolfini arts centre in Bristol.
The first show of 2017 is the biggest to date. House Style (25 March to 22 October 2017) is an ambitious fashion exhibition curated with the close involvement of the family, with costumes drawn from Chatsworth’s historic and contemporary collections as well as other sources. Displayed throughout the house, costumes are shown in their original setting so that visitors can see them in the context of the family’s story.
Unlike museums, historic houses rarely use text labels, but there is often a hunger for more information, says Brindley.
“It’s about how you keep the balance between the ambience of a room and information for those who want to look deeper into an exhibit or theme,” she says. “Part of our constant debate as a historic house is how people can get more out of particular items. It’s a different approach, where we are looking at the objects in their environment and finding ways to mediate them. There are myriad ways to do this – events, audio, live interpretation. What’s important is how we diversify and work with new audiences. It’s a huge and exciting opportunity.”
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance writer and editor