Opening Doors: Learning in the Historic Environment

Section G · Sectors within the historic environment

G 3 · Historic houses

Numbers

The number of historic houses in the United Kingdom which are open regularly or by arrangement, is very considerable. The National Trust for England, Wales and Northern Ireland has approximately 200 historic properties, with a small but important group belonging to English Heritage. Privately-owned country houses open to the public number about 350 throughout the United Kingdom, with a further 250 open on a part-time basis. In addition, around a hundred historic houses are owned and run by Local Authorities, either shown as historic interiors (as at Heaton Hall in Manchester) or, more frequently, as museums (including Wollaton Hall in Nottingham). Anumber of ‘shrines’ associated with famous people are open to visitors, while urban houses such as the Wilberforce House Museum in Hull and Treasurer’s House in York can also be visited. The National Trust for Scotland has some twenty houses open to visitors. In Ireland, some twenty historic houses, in the ownership of families and the National Trust, are open to visitors.

Of all these houses the most famous are the country houses which survive in the ownership of their original families and fully furnished, in a way that rarely exists elsewhere. They range from the very large such as Chatsworth to the small and intimate like Fursdon in Devonshire, which has been in the possession of the same family since the thirteenth century.

Country house visiting

Country houses have been open to visitors for hundreds of years, as Peter Mandler discussed in his book The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (1997). Only in the earlier years of the twentieth century did many which had received visitors for a long period close their doors. The opening of country houses revived on a more commercial basis, from the late 1940s onwards.

Country house visiting has historically relied on two modes of communication: the human guide and the printed guide. For both, the principal subjects of discussion have been the architecture and art contained in the house, and the present or former family owners.

Competition

Houses face much greater competition than in the past, from a wide range of other attractions (which often offer more family-oriented attractions than country houses can afford) and Sunday shopping. In addition, many houses tend not to change what they present. Whereas museums realised long ago that return visitors were primarily attracted by temporary exhibitions, these are seldom seen in country houses (with some notable exceptions such as Harewood House and Burghley House). Country houses have had limited success in attracting younger visitors, who may find the picture of life and society presented in a historic houses unfamiliar and even alien.

Gardens continue to be extremely popular, and those properties where the house forms part of a larger entity, including gardens, estates and other attractions, have seen an increase in visitors. The National Trust has enjoyed a rise in the number of visitors to its historic houses over the past few years.

The house as home

Houses, as places where people once lived or still live, evoke a strong personal response in visitors. A television poll on Channel 5 in the summer of 2003 showed that the most popular houses were Chatsworth (open to the public for many years, with a particularly welcoming atmosphere, it gives the impression that it ‘belongs to the people’) and Erddig, the house of the Yorke family and their servants, which succeeds in communicating a sense of the experience of everyday life. A welcoming atmosphere and a sense of narrative and of individual histories, past and present, are crucial to successful presentation.

Changing interpretations

In the past thirty years, the interpretation of houses has changed. One of the most important developments was the redisplay of Hampton Court Palace after the disastrous fire of 1986. The Palace has been on view for close to two hundred years but by the 1980s it had become a weary parade of meaningless show rooms. In the redisplay, the old functions of the royal apartments were reexplored, with the King’s Apartments and the kitchens, shown as they would have been historically. The tramp round endless unconnected rooms was replaced by a series of tours which allow visitors the freedom to make their own choices and explore the way in which the rooms were used.

Houses and education

What has changed in some cases is the approach to education. Some larger houses, in both National Trust and private ownership, have developed education programmes. In a few cases, as at Harewood House and Culzean Castle, these are well-staffed and form a central part of the life of these house, constantly evolving to meet new demands and reflecting the creativity of the staff. In some cases, learning activities have become rather stuck, concentrating primarily on young children and relying heavily on Living History of a not always very imaginative sort. Many smaller houses do not offer any opportunities for schools, though many of their owners would like to do so and recognise that this is the way of the future. Often they simply do not know how to go about organising such events, and lack the resources to pay for staff or accommodation, or to establish contacts with schools or adult groups.

Partnerships

Country houses have tended to operate in isolation, other than for publicity purposes in the case of some of the largest properties. For teaching purposes, this isolation has proved a limiting factor, particularly since many houses are physically relatively inaccessible, and funding is limited. Equally there has, historically, been little collaboration between bodies such as the National Trust and private or local authority owners.

A major initiative that has developed recently is the collaboration between English Heritage and the Historic Houses Association, which is discussed below.

The holistic approach

In the past, historic houses have tended to be viewed in isolation from their gardens and parks, and from the landed estates which in many cases provided their main source of income. This tendency is marked in the case of houses in the care of a Local Authority, where the house is in the charge of the Leisure or Museums Department while the surrounding open spaces (often to within a few feet of the walls of the house) are looked after by the Parks and Gardens Department. In terms of learning, this division – whether cultural or administrative – has tended to make the actual houses appear an unnatural phenomenon, divorced from the real world.

The layering of houses – the contributions made over many years by different generations and that contribute to the character of the buildings and their surroundings – is explored in some houses, but could be extended.

Art interpretation

As we have seen, the two principal approaches to the interpretation of country houses are Living History and the art- or architecture-oriented approach. These have their place and can be used very effectively: exciting work is being carried out at a number of houses such as Harewood House. On the other hand, some of the most active and energetic houses extend their ambitions far beyond these approaches.

The traditional approach to ‘art’ interpretation for the general visitor is a parade of names and dates and titles, associated with architecture, paintings or the decorative arts. Often these facts means very little to the people receiving the information and not much more to the person offering it: what do these often-repeated names ‘Chippendale’ or ‘Gainsborough’ or ‘Capability Brown’ actually mean? The recitation of bare information, whether spoken or written, is of limited interest and is hard for the listener to absorb who is not already acquainted with the subject. The art history approach offered to the general visitor (less often to school parties) needs to be reconsidered, and flesh needs to be put on the bone as it is in many art museums.

Alternatively, there are other approaches which can be used in parallel or on their own:

How the place functions now

Much the most interesting aspect of many historic houses for many visitors is how the place works. Living History may give some idea of how the house used to work but for many people information about what happens now is more instructive and enjoyable. Although this approach is still quite rare, some properties do offer an explanation of how the building is administered, how it is heated or cleaned, how it is kept in good repair, how the garden is maintained or improved, how the estate is looked after and of course who lives there.

In this field the National Trust has for a long time been a pioneer, offering in its Putting to Bed Days a demonstration of how historic houses are looked after, including controlling pest and environmental damage at Calke Abbey; and informal conservation days at Treasurer’s House in York where visitors can participate in the conservation process while learning about cleaning techniques which they can use themselves.

At Chatsworth the house staff have been encouraged to offer special sessions for visitors, who are able to learn how the seventeenth century plumbing system circulated water around the house and gardens, or how textiles are conserved in the textile centre. The effect has been very productive, with many members of the staff turning out to be born communicators.

How the house was created

The art-oriented approach to a country house is very limiting. There are many other stories to be told about houses:

How houses were constructed and paid for – the sources of the owners’ wealth; the way houses were built over a long period of time as money allowed.
How houses were inhabited – for example, how meals were prepared; how, when and where meals were served; changes in eating habits; how rooms were lit and heated.
How entertaining was offered – the nature of entertainments; the use of state rooms; political entertaining.
The life led by particular groups – the role of women, and how they had different levels of independence at different times; how children were brought up.
Fundamental issues such as privacy and the role of domestic service – how people circulated round the building.
The nature of collections – why did people collect: because of tradition, for purposes of display, from enthusiasm and love of objects, because of personal obsessions?

Many of these issues are the subject of recent innovative academic work, such as Richard Wilson and Alan Mackley’s Creating Paradise: The Building of the English Country House 1660 - 1880 (2000). This information does not necessarily reach the people working in the house as interpreters, or even the curators.

Theatre

In many cases successful presentation of a historic house to the public is like presenting a piece of theatre. This link between theatre and the historic buildings is suggested by the success of Living History over many years, as well as by the long-established fashion for suggesting that these rooms are inhabited. This is a fashion which leads to all sorts of conventions including leaving beds unmade, dotting the clothes and personal possessions of fictitious people around the rooms, introducing wax work figures (as at Warwick Castle) and playing recorded or real music. One of the most extreme examples of this approach is 18 Folgate Street in Spitalfields in London, the house of the late Dennis Severs. This is pure theatre, an eighteenth century house which is the home of an invented family, animated for the compulsorily silent visitor by the stimulation of the senses – smells, the sound of horses’ hoofs, lighting by candle light and gas.

While not all owners would want to go quite so far, the experience there has a good deal to tell us. In some cases, theatrical devices are used but in combination with a scholarly detachment which restricts the artifice to visual material. At both Brodsworth Hall in Yorkshire and at Calke Abbey in Derbyshire, the restoration of the house by respectively English Heritage and the National Trust has attempted to present the house as it was when found - in other words as images of decay. The deterioration of the fabric has been lovingly conserved. What is lacking, necessarily, are the actual smells or sounds of these houses when they were inhabited by their last private owners.

Stories

For many visitors to houses, of all ages, the thing that brings a house to life is the story of the people who lived there, whether owners, friends or employees. This was something that the Victorians understood, and their accounts of houses are full of stories related to the history of England or Scotland, whether of Henry VIII and his wives or Mary Queen of Scots. Houses are full of stories but they are often not properly told: the attempt to offer an inclusive approach which explain all the contents of a house makes it very difficult to tell a story in any depth. And of course such activities require time and preparation as well as money.

Owners and managers might consider a new type of guided tour or personal visit – based on the lives of an individual or a group of people associated with a great house. While the person cannot return, the memories can.

Research

The relationship between country houses and museums is an ambiguous one. Many of those involved with the care of historic houses are anxious to preserve the inhabited quality of the building, notably by excluding labels from the presentation. In fact houses open to the public may find that museums have a good deal to offer them – this is a barrier which is beginning to come down. Historic houses are often shy of investigating their past or of analysing why they look as they do. They also seldom use their archives to discover more about the history of the house, at least at the level of interpretation.

Some houses are keen to explore this aspect of the past. There is considerable scope – one suggestion made at a colloquium for this report is that MA or doctoral candidates in history or history of art could write archivebased study of historic houses which would serve as the basis for guidebooks and revised interpretations of major historic buildings.

Aston Hall, Birmingham

Following the launch in October 2001 of the national programme, Renaissance in the Regions – A New Vision for England’s Museums, the education service of Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, the lead museum service in the region, is able to provide activities for Warwickshire schools, not just schools in Birmingham. For instance, at Aston Hall 50,000 children visit every year, and about half of them are taught by the education service. Following demand from teachers, the service provides a discussion of the character of the building. Their programme Aston Hall and the Civil War has met increasing demand and includes giving children the chance to interpret original documents. KS4 classes use the Study for History, which is evidence-based.

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