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Making history

How historic houses are reinventing themselves and attracting new visitors
Caroline Bugler
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Stepping inside English Heritage’s Eltham Palace in south-east London is like entering as an esteemed guest.

Armed with a card encouraging you to imagine you have turned up as one of eight characters at a cocktail party in April 1938, you enter the oval hall where a cocktail shaker (unfortunately empty) and glasses wait on the side table.

The imaginary butler on the audioguide steers you round the house, which was once the site of a royal palace where Henry VIII spent his childhood. It was later transformed into an art deco masterpiece by Stephen and Virginia Courtauld in the 1930s.

In Virginia’s dressing room, vintage clothes hang in the wardrobe and “guests” are invited to try on replica dresses, coats and hats, and sniff her favourite scent in the bathroom. In Stephen’s bedroom, his evening dress hangs on a stand.

In the basement, a luxury bunker complete with billiard table gives a flavour of life during the war, when the palace was used as an air raid shelter.

Having undergone a £1.7m makeover, which involved opening up five new rooms, the revamped house was unveiled on 1 April this year, the day English Heritage was officially split into two: Historic England, which advises on listing, planning, grants and heritage research, and the new English Heritage, given independent charitable status, which will continue to care for more than 400 historic sites.

The latter has a government grant of £80m to spend over the next eight years, at the end of which it aims to be self-funding.

The revamped Eltham Palace proved an instant hit: visitor numbers in the first three months were 64% higher than in the same period last year.

According to Anna Eavis, the curatorial director at English Heritage, there is an inevitable tail off after an initial spike in footfall following a refurbishment, but the hope is that visitor numbers will set- tle at a higher level than before.

Immersive thinking

Eltham Palace follows a trend towards more immersive interpretation being adopted at other historic houses and sites, where the need to attract new audiences and revenue is encouraging fresh thinking.

The popularity of television period dramas such as Downton Abbey has led to increased expectations of the full upstairs- downstairs experience.

For many potential visitors, it is the social history embod-ied in houses that is the main attraction, and the key to bringing a venue to life may be building a coherent narrative that places people rather than objects at the centre of the story.

It is revealing, for example, that one of the finalists for the Art Fund’s annual Museum of the Year award was the National Trust’s Dunham Massey, Cheshire, for its imaginative two-year exhibition, Sanctuary from the Trenches (until 11 November).

The project has seen the Georgian mansion recreated as Stamford Military Hospital, its role during the first world war when it cared for more than 300 wounded soldiers. Most items from the collection have been moved into storage and the house offers a theatrical experience, where costumed actors perform imagined scenes from the lives of doctors, nurses and patients.

The exhibition, described by the Art Fund judges as a “pioneering model that might serve as a template for other National Trust properties”, has been a huge success. Visitor numbers more than trebled during the first season from March to November 2014.

In a similar vein, English Heritage has also employed actors rather than conventional room guides at the 12th-century keep of Dover Castle that was once occupied by the court of Henry II. On summer weekends, they act amid replica furniture, giving a vivid impression of life in the royal court.

But this is no exercise in Disneyfication. “Such efforts have to be underpinned by rig- orous academic research,” Eavis says. “At Dover, there were no historic documents specifying the kind of furniture Henry II used, so we employed the best researchers to make sure the re-creation and replicas were as authentic as possible.”

Eavis is convinced that such initiatives have been key in determining the future of her organisation. “Projects like Dover Castle have been instrumental in us being able to make a case for charitable status, with the aim to become self-funding.”

Up the Kent coast from Dover, Walmer Castle is also undergoing a transformation that puts the emphasis on the personal. The bedroom in which the Duke of Wellington slept during his stays there and the chair in which he died present an intimate story that contrasts with the grandeur of Apsley House, his London residence.

Plans are afoot to re-create Darwin’s bedroom at his home, Down House, in Kent.

Sarah Moulden, the curator of collections at Down House, Eltham Palace and Ranger’s House in Greenwich, says that many people are curious about the man himself, not just his theories.

“We want to know what Darwin wore in bed, where he slept, what the view from his window was like.”

Moulden is keen to point out that the way history is viewed constantly evolves. “We can never reconstruct the past fully, but what we can do is reimagine it in the way period dramas do,” she says.

“In 10 years it may be different, but we are trying to chime with how we perceive history today while aiming for something that will not look dated in a decade. It’s a question of having a light touch, using what we have, but also applying the necessary imagination.”

Houses often have long and complicated histories, so effective storytelling often means concentrating on one particular episode or era, rather than retelling the history of a place in strict linear chronology.

Audley End in Essex is an architecturally distinguished Jacobean house, but its later Victorian history makes for a more compelling narrative, particularly for younger visitors. The nursery suite at the top of the house has been opened up and children can play games and try on clothes.

The newly opened Coal Gallery, with its bunkers full of coal and cupboards stocked with soap and candles, offers an insight into the hard life of Victorian servants. Eavis says this has made a significant difference to the visitor profile.

“Before we did the nursery and the Coal Gallery families would go to Audley End
and visit the kitchens, the dairy and the horses, but they did not go inside the house,” she says. “Now they do.”

Ground rules

Families are also an important audience at Osborne House, Queen Victoria’s holiday home on the Isle of Wight.

Its state rooms might have seemed overwhelming to children in years gone past, but by giving access to the private beach where she used to bathe, and refurbishing the Swiss cottage that Prince Albert built for their children, the site has become appealing to a wider audience.

English Heritage owns a number of ruined properties where it isn’t possible to present fully furnished rooms, but interiors can be animated in other ways.

The simple act of installing a viewing platform in Queen Elizabeth I’s bedroom at Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire, which is a shell of its former self, means visitors can see the view she would have had, complete with a recreated Elizabethan garden.

Digital technology offers exciting possi- bilities too, particularly to a generation of young people familiar with the high-quality rendering of history in online games.

“The best approach for a big unfurnished country house or ruin may well be to leave it empty and breathe life into it by digital innovation and temporary programmes,” Eavis says.

English Heritage’s charity status, with its increased funding and freedom, will enable it to plan similar schemes in future, includ- ing for small sites.

“Before this year, with about £200,000 to spend on such sites, we would only have been able to afford to give a representation scheme at one or two small paying sites and a handful of free ones,” says Eavis.
 
“But we now have £10m to spend on smaller properties. And we have £18m to invest in larger sites – we might make a significant commercial return as we will use that amount to leverage additional money.”

Projects in the pipeline include revamp- ing the interpretation at Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire, opening up the gatehouse at Battle Abbey in Sussex and building a bridge to the island at Tintagel in Cornwall.

Attracting visitors can never be a case of one size fits all and it’s not always possible to construct a coherent narrative. Moulden and her colleagues are thinking about the future of Ranger’s House in Greenwich, which is presented as a gallery housing art on loan from the Wernher Collection.

“The objects are outstanding,” Moulden says. “The tour is centred around looking at objects that may be tiny, like Gothic ivories, which Sir Julius Wernher – a wealthy diamond magnate – collected. We can let the objects speak for themselves without bio- graphical information.”

Improved presentation requires visitor services to match – a decent cafe can be crucial and the lack of one at Ranger’s House is being debated.

“The important thing is to recognise that there isn’t just one type of visitor,” Eavis says. “We have to strike a balance between what can be competing needs.”


Private showings

While inventive interpretation is key to English Heritage’s efforts to attract new visitors, there are other ways to lure people to historic properties.

A number of privately owned stately homes are using temporary art exhibitions to achieve this. Many of these shows have an intimate connection with the property’s history or collections, which adds substance to the way they are viewed.

Houghton Revisited, an exhibition at Houghton Hall, Norfolk in 2013, reunited a substantial number of the paintings that once graced the walls of the house before they were sold to Catherine the Great of Russia.

Reportedly, 100,000 people visited the show.The previous year, Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire had critical and popular success with Taking Time, a small show
of works by the 18th-century French painter Jean-Siméon Chardin built around its acquisition of his work, Boy Building a House of Cards (1735).

The gracious rooms and extensive grounds of country houses can also provide perfect spaces for contemporary artworks. The current exhibition at Chatsworth House, in Derbyshire, is Make Yourself Comfortable (until 23 October), which puts chairs at the centre of the experience.

The seats, made by leading contemporary designers, are placed throughout the house,
encouraging visitors to relax on them and gain new perspectives on the interiors.

In Chatsworth’s grandiose grounds, monumental sculptures are on display in Beyond Limits, the annual autumn exhibition of contemporary sculpture (until 25 October).

Oxfordshire’s Blenheim Palace is following the success of last year’s major show of work by dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei with an exhibition by the American conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner (10 October-20 December), which will include site-specific pieces integrated into the palace’s ornate interiors, as well as works produced throughout Weiner’s 50-year career.


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