Converting a historic house into a museum SO THAT they aren't at odds with each other must be the equivalent of attempting a triple Lutz on ice. Get it wrong, and you risk more than a bruised derrière. You could find yourself before the high court of heritage accused of grievous aesthetic harm.
When Simon Jenkins, the journalist and judge of Britain's hundred best historic houses, visited Cusworth Hall a few years ago, he found the neoclassical building on a hill overlooking Doncaster poorly indeed. It looked neglected and was suffering a bad case of museumitis.
To have seen Cusworth before its refurb would have been something. You can imagine what it looked like, cluttered with mismatched furniture in the form of showcases, and wall-papered with dull graphics. There were parts of it too dangerous to enter: atmospheric, but dilapidated. Would two years and £7.5m of tender loving care kill or cure the patient?
You would be hard pressed to find signs of neglect today. From the driveway Cusworth looks as good as new: austere, symmetrical and statelier than you might expect. Unusually, banners advertising garden shops, bouncy castles or the next battlefield re-enactment were absent, only a discreet sign on the double staircase announcing Cusworth and its opening hours.
Beyond the hallway, where a modern copy of a portrait of the first owner hangs (the original is in private hands) and the visitor finds themselves in the presence of a far more interesting local dignitary. She is Lesley Garrett, the diva of Doncaster. You can admire her sequined red dress. It's a pity she doesn't belt out an aria. Garrett is known for her down-to-earth attitude to grand opera.
Cusworth Hall, now the museum of Doncaster life, has an appealing whiff of the big grade 1 listed house whose doors have been thrown open to the common people - it's palatial and it's ours.
Other country-house owners must shudder at the thought: 'There but for the grace of the common agricultural policy.' So in one wing there is a display about the town's industrial heritage, its miners, engineers and railwaymen, closely followed by a gallery about Doncaster racecourse.
Mannequins of a tout in his mac and a jockey in silks form the centrepiece; previous owners are merely also-rans. There was a Lady Isabella at the start of the 20th century who modernised the house, but I got horribly confused with an earlier Isabella in the 18th century and thought she had installed what would have been an incredibly early lift.
In the service wing you find all things domesticated and plenty of gadgets. Here you can get into another historical muddle. In the kitchen we are told that labour-saving devices were a great boon, particularly for women.
Next door, in the laundry with its parade of vacuum cleaners and washing tubs, the visitor is told that these inventions tied women even closer to the home and made them busier. True, the machines didn't dust and wash up by themselves, but its takes a couple of confusingly laid-out graphic panels to labour the point.
Written interpretation isn't Cusworth's strong point with object labels of the laundry-list variety: a policeman's jacket is labelled, 'policeman's jacket'; the photograph of a boy leaning on crutches is described as, you've guessed it, 'a photograph of a boy on crutches'.
The text is more revealing when describing the details of the various rooms on the ground and second floors, which are open to the public. When Simon Jenkins came a-calling, he gave Cusworth two out of five stars because of its library and chapel, high marks, in his book, for South Yorkshire.
In the library the visitor can admire the gothic-style bookcases, long emptied. The house's contents had been auctioned off by the time Doncaster council saved the house in the early 1960s. Behind layers of paint in the chapel survived murals of the Good Shepherd and other scenes from the Bible, which decorate the altar and ceiling. These have been painstakingly revealed and preserved.
In the corridor outside there is a display about local religious life, high church and low, synagogue and mosque. When the display relates to their surroundings like this, as in a dining room full of tableware, Cusworth gives any countryhouse museum a run for its money.
The presumably bespoke showcases in the centre of several rooms are also worth noting. They look a bit like four-poster beds with corner uprights that house up-lighters to reveal the ceilings' ornamental plasterwork.
Another example of Cusworth's ingenuity is putting a coffin-sized showcase within a Victorian hearse. You find this in a former bedroom, intriguingly named Nasty Things In Life. Is nastiness a category on the social history classification index? Possibly not.
In fact, here it covers the usual things: healthcare, crime and poverty, with the second world war thrown in for good measure. Why do social-history curators automatically link crime and poverty, as if white-collar crime didn't exist?
Superfluous details are petty offences in the grand scheme of things when you consider all that has been achieved - 20,000 objects tagged and the same number of shrubs planted outside, as the visitors are proudly told.
And the tearoom knocks spots off the standard fare of heritage catering. Enjoying a ploughman's lunch, garnished with kiwi fruit and grapes outside the former stable block, it was only fitting to toast Doncaster, its council and the Heritage Lottery Fund for keeping faith with the old place.
Doncaster's elders strolled in the sunshine, its youth snogged on its sweeping lawns, their town of semis and superstores laid before them: Cusworth revisited.
Javier Pes is editor of Museums Practice
Project data:
Cost: £7.3m complete restoration, of which £499,000 design
Project management: Hornagold & Hills
Architect: Geoffrey Holland, Purcell, Miller & Tritton (York)
Designers: MKW Design Partnership, Edinburgh
Audiovisuals: Centre Screen Productions, Manchester; Fern Studios, Connisborough
Interactives: Mike Cox Associates, Hull
When Simon Jenkins, the journalist and judge of Britain's hundred best historic houses, visited Cusworth Hall a few years ago, he found the neoclassical building on a hill overlooking Doncaster poorly indeed. It looked neglected and was suffering a bad case of museumitis.
To have seen Cusworth before its refurb would have been something. You can imagine what it looked like, cluttered with mismatched furniture in the form of showcases, and wall-papered with dull graphics. There were parts of it too dangerous to enter: atmospheric, but dilapidated. Would two years and £7.5m of tender loving care kill or cure the patient?
You would be hard pressed to find signs of neglect today. From the driveway Cusworth looks as good as new: austere, symmetrical and statelier than you might expect. Unusually, banners advertising garden shops, bouncy castles or the next battlefield re-enactment were absent, only a discreet sign on the double staircase announcing Cusworth and its opening hours.
Beyond the hallway, where a modern copy of a portrait of the first owner hangs (the original is in private hands) and the visitor finds themselves in the presence of a far more interesting local dignitary. She is Lesley Garrett, the diva of Doncaster. You can admire her sequined red dress. It's a pity she doesn't belt out an aria. Garrett is known for her down-to-earth attitude to grand opera.
Cusworth Hall, now the museum of Doncaster life, has an appealing whiff of the big grade 1 listed house whose doors have been thrown open to the common people - it's palatial and it's ours.
Other country-house owners must shudder at the thought: 'There but for the grace of the common agricultural policy.' So in one wing there is a display about the town's industrial heritage, its miners, engineers and railwaymen, closely followed by a gallery about Doncaster racecourse.
Mannequins of a tout in his mac and a jockey in silks form the centrepiece; previous owners are merely also-rans. There was a Lady Isabella at the start of the 20th century who modernised the house, but I got horribly confused with an earlier Isabella in the 18th century and thought she had installed what would have been an incredibly early lift.
In the service wing you find all things domesticated and plenty of gadgets. Here you can get into another historical muddle. In the kitchen we are told that labour-saving devices were a great boon, particularly for women.
Next door, in the laundry with its parade of vacuum cleaners and washing tubs, the visitor is told that these inventions tied women even closer to the home and made them busier. True, the machines didn't dust and wash up by themselves, but its takes a couple of confusingly laid-out graphic panels to labour the point.
Written interpretation isn't Cusworth's strong point with object labels of the laundry-list variety: a policeman's jacket is labelled, 'policeman's jacket'; the photograph of a boy leaning on crutches is described as, you've guessed it, 'a photograph of a boy on crutches'.
The text is more revealing when describing the details of the various rooms on the ground and second floors, which are open to the public. When Simon Jenkins came a-calling, he gave Cusworth two out of five stars because of its library and chapel, high marks, in his book, for South Yorkshire.
In the library the visitor can admire the gothic-style bookcases, long emptied. The house's contents had been auctioned off by the time Doncaster council saved the house in the early 1960s. Behind layers of paint in the chapel survived murals of the Good Shepherd and other scenes from the Bible, which decorate the altar and ceiling. These have been painstakingly revealed and preserved.
In the corridor outside there is a display about local religious life, high church and low, synagogue and mosque. When the display relates to their surroundings like this, as in a dining room full of tableware, Cusworth gives any countryhouse museum a run for its money.
The presumably bespoke showcases in the centre of several rooms are also worth noting. They look a bit like four-poster beds with corner uprights that house up-lighters to reveal the ceilings' ornamental plasterwork.
Another example of Cusworth's ingenuity is putting a coffin-sized showcase within a Victorian hearse. You find this in a former bedroom, intriguingly named Nasty Things In Life. Is nastiness a category on the social history classification index? Possibly not.
In fact, here it covers the usual things: healthcare, crime and poverty, with the second world war thrown in for good measure. Why do social-history curators automatically link crime and poverty, as if white-collar crime didn't exist?
Superfluous details are petty offences in the grand scheme of things when you consider all that has been achieved - 20,000 objects tagged and the same number of shrubs planted outside, as the visitors are proudly told.
And the tearoom knocks spots off the standard fare of heritage catering. Enjoying a ploughman's lunch, garnished with kiwi fruit and grapes outside the former stable block, it was only fitting to toast Doncaster, its council and the Heritage Lottery Fund for keeping faith with the old place.
Doncaster's elders strolled in the sunshine, its youth snogged on its sweeping lawns, their town of semis and superstores laid before them: Cusworth revisited.
Javier Pes is editor of Museums Practice
Project data:
Cost: £7.3m complete restoration, of which £499,000 design
Project management: Hornagold & Hills
Architect: Geoffrey Holland, Purcell, Miller & Tritton (York)
Designers: MKW Design Partnership, Edinburgh
Audiovisuals: Centre Screen Productions, Manchester; Fern Studios, Connisborough
Interactives: Mike Cox Associates, Hull
