Chelsea

So, I’ve been very quiet this last month catching up after my holiday. I ought to put that right.

A couple of weeks ago I had an invite to the RHS Chelsea flower show. My wife was incredibly jealous, but it was just the one ticket. I went after work.

The invite was from Centrepoint, the charity working with young homeless people. We’d helped them put a small garden together in the continuous learning section of the Pavillion. As I have blogged before, for a couple of years, young people that Centrepoint are supporting through a horticulture training course have been staying at Scotney Castle for a week, and helping restore and maintain the gardens.

The Centrepoint garden at Chelsea was inspired by Scotney’s walled garden and it was a little gem. It won a bronze.

But we were trumped! We’ve been quietly proud of our work with Centrepoint, we must have welcomed nearly a hundred young homeless people through our doors since we started, and the garden was a much to celebrate that as it was to celebrate Centrepoint’s own 40th anniversary. We even thought the media might be interested, and they were – locally at least. But then Centrepoint contacted the BBC about coverage during their Chelsea programme. They listened politely and then said “You do know about the Eden Projects garden, don’t you?”

10,000. Ten thousand homeless people and prisoners collaborated with the Eden Project on their Chelsea Garden. Kind of knocks our efforts into a cocked hat.

Golden Eyes

At Hinemihi in Clandon, where the carpark is full to bursting. Visitors have been attracted by the promise of a day of Pacific Islander dance and stories. I love Hinemihi. I got married at Clandon (long before I worked with the Trust) and Hinemihi was the backdrop of a whole bunch of Portraits.

Now it’s the backdrop instead for some cultural exchange. I love the fact we’re this. Clandon has long celebrated it’s links with New Zealand, but Hinemihi has for too long, fir most of our visitors, been the unusual summerhouse that Lord Onslow bought at the end of the Nineteeth century. Yes, it’s also long been a focus and special place for the UK Pacific Islander community, but that’s happened for the most part without the knowledge of our mainly white, mainly middle-class supporters.

This event though celebrates Hinemihi and Clandon’s links, not just with the past, but also the modern day Islander and Maori community.

PS
As I’ve been writing this the London Mapri club have been signing this beautiful welcome song and Haka, and I wish I had a way of putting sound here. Time to check out Audioboo…

PPS. I did, and here it is

Back from my holidays

Sorry, there hasn’t been any activity on this blog for the last month.  To be honest, there won’t be much for a little while, as I’m still ploughing through the backlog in my inbox that built up while I was on holiday. If you want to see what I and my family got up to in New Zealand and Australia, check out our holiday blog.

Back at work though, all sorts of things have been happening. Of immediate interest to the web-savvy is the Googlegroup set up by a volunteer at Knole for the other volunteers there. he has put a great deal of thought into building and populating a secure framework for content, which volunteers can access, and a coomunications channel for news. It’s not yet been released to more than a small group fo volunteers who are testing it all, but I am very impressed. I know other properties are thinking of doing something similar, and I think they should use this a model.

Week two

Visiting Hindhead today, to walk through to commons by Gibbet Hill and down to the A3 tunnel viewing platform. Then to the Devil’s Punchbowl café for sausages. Very busy, the good weather has brought out the visitors. Week two last year was so bad because of poor weather, and it started a trend that gave us a very poor result in the region. Today marks the end of this year’s week two, and on the evidence I see around me, it will be a big improvement on last year.

Nothing to do with work

But important to me. In 1985 my life changed in so many ways. Now, what? 24 years later, I’m doing something I realize I’ve been waiting for since then. I’m in the cinema, about to see Watchmen.

Happy Birthday Charles

Next Thursday is the 200 year anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. We’ve been working, though our Growing Roots project, with RBG Kew, who in turn have received funding from the Wellcome Trust, and have produced some really good looking resources to encourage children explore wildlife and plants. Today my colleague Anita sent out a link to the resources.

As she says “Our fab ‘Growing Roots’ project officer in the South East is working in partnership with RBG Kew and has spent the last few months putting her blood, sweat and tears into them…Utilise these downloadable resources for family events, pick up and go activities for half terms or embrace for Wild Child activities…The webpages have only just gone live in the last few hours…

 

http://www.kew.org/thinking-walks/

 

Project management

It’s late and I should be getting into bed, but at last Friday’s meeting, someone mentioned Basecamp, and that made me think about collaboration software, and that let me to Project Pier. I toying with the idea of, when I return to my CLV job, using this to keep my disparate team and client properties in touch with each other and our projects. Just toying with it at the moment.

Not going to work today

Snow, deeper than I’ve seen it since I was a little boy, January 1976. The two main roads between here and work are closed. And there are abandonded cars all over local hills. So I’m working from home.

A lightbulb moment

I love this picture, the room is in Saddlescombe Farm, and apart from the lightbulb looks almost exactly as it is drawn in a book about the farm in the 1860’s. If a funny little place, only open to the public a couple if days a year, but right onthe South Downs way. I spent a (freezing) Tuesday afternoon there, planning with colleagues how we might make it more accessible. We could try selling tea there on Summer week-ends, but we can’t attract too many cars there, as it’s such a sensitive site. So our main target will be walkers and riders, and perhaps we can attract people down from the top of Devil’s Dyke.

On Friday I found myself sitting at head office, working out the terms of reference for a proposed Technology for Engagement Group. It includes a number of people on the succesful Virtual Tours group (we had our phpto taken afterwards for the staff magazine, to celebrate our JODI award). We plan to support properties looking into using new technology for interpretation and it was interesting to hear the ideas that were coming in – Tyntesfield are exploring “mscapes” or mediascapes, and I’d not heard of these before. Other properties were thinking about podcasts and vidcasts and user generated web content.

The group also plans to be a first point of contact for companies and researchers approaching the Trust with innovative ideas, and I was keen that we should be a fixed term group, so we discussed running for two years. And maybe finishing with a technology conference.

Anyhow, today I’m thinking that we haven’t yet thought about how new media might improve access to Saddlescombe without attracting cars.

Simon Jenkins brings people to my blog

I’m looking at my blogs stats, and seeing a small but healthy level of interest. What is interesting is that a number of people pitch up here after searching for “Simon Jenkins” I’ve just Googled it, and my blog doesn’t appear on the first page. I’m too lazy to look further, but I’m guessing any link to me is pages deep in Google, so those coming to me through that search must be determined researchers. I bet they’re disappointed, my only reference to Simon Jenkins thus far has been a poorly typed “live” blog from his speech at a conference.

I feel its my duty to offer something controversial, like “Why Simon Jenkins is Wrong”. But, Google that, and you get a parade of similarly titled blog posts. So I simply take this opportunity to say thank you to him for driving a little attention my way, my drivel isn’t worthy to be compared to his writing.

Our new chair has a vision for Trust, which he mentioned in that speech but also sets out in an article for the Times. There’s a lot in there I like: he talks of our house managers becoming impresarios, creating engaging atmospheres in our mansions. But there is something I take issue with. He talks of the National Trust being a victim of overbearing Health and Safety. And its not the first time that he’s said that.

This role I have sits me on the regional Health and Safety Committee and from my limited experience it isn’t legislation, or the HSE, that is the problem. The committee considers actual accidents that have happened, and tries to learn lessons from them that might prevent the same thing happening again. It involves a lot of people, but it doesn’t happen often, and I think my time is well spent. Broadly speaking, I see the HSE doing the same thing on a national scale.

It isn’t legislation or the HSE that decides whether “the manager of an adventure centre in the Lake District has to fill in a risk assesment for each party of schoolchildren.” (Which in fact they don’t. Its up to the leader of the school-party to make the risk assessment. What we do, to help them, is give them a pre-prepared form or “exchange of information” which lists the possible risks that we are aware of.) It is not “Overzealous health and safety regulations” which “are impeding more public participation in our properties.” It is greed. It is compensation lawyers, and the people who see the National Trust as wealthy well-insured organisation, that will more than likely pay out on a personal injury claim. The sort of people who jump from a tree and break their leg, then suggest we should compensate them because we hadn’t taken reasonable measures to ensure our trees where not easy to climb!

So there you have it. Simon Jenkins was wrong after all.