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.

Buttonhooks

Another quickie. I’ve been passed a copy of The Boutonneur, the journal of the Buttonhook Society. Issue No 172, for September has half a page on Scotney Castle, praising us for putting Mrs Hussey’s buttonhook on display. As the correspondant writes “Many curators seem to be a bit sniffy about [button hooks] as if they are artefacts of little importance, whereas we know that for a long period history civilised life would have come to halt without a buttonhook.” I’m glad we’ve managed to recognise their importance at Scotney Castle.

Scotney again

I’m at Scotney Castle again today, and there’s been so much happening since I was last here. Today, for example, I’m being shown a recently disovered suitcase full of early twentieth-century clothes (see picture). The team at Scotney are planning on unpacking this and similar boxes in public every Thursday in October. I think it’s a very exciting thing for people to see, and demonstrates the interest that the house, effectively a new aquisition, holds for the people that work here, and for visitors coming to see the work as it progresses. This is why we no-longer open houses as “finished products”, but let people in to see the discoveries the team make and the changes that occur as work progresses.

The downside is the complaints. Some people still expect the full National Trust experience from day one, and the Scotney team and I have to deal with people complaining about are temporary refreshments offer, desipte the fact they can see the building work going on that will allow us to have a proper tea-room.

Holiday email

I’ve been out of the office for some time, and very busy before that clearing my backlog so I could go on holiday. Hence no words on this blog. Now of course I have a whole new backlog of unread emails to work through. But one of those emails was something I had to share:

Servants bells among the pipework at Scotney Castle

Chloe, the house manager at Scotney Castle said in her email “I am letting you know some exciting news concerning Scotney Castle! Whilst trying to locate the various routes for the water pipes in the house at Scotney this week, we had to look inside the hatch in the corridor of the Housekeepers Flat.  We made the exciting discovery in this area of the original servants bells!  We have counted 22 bells in this ceiling void. The Housekeepers Flat was part of the original servants hall before the flats were designed in the 1950’s.  We can see some of the original colour scheme for the paintwork in the servants wing. We have also established that some of the bells are still connected and in working order.”

Edit: Chloe has asked me to point out that this particular duct, and its bells, are in a part of the house that won’t be open to the public.

Other blogs

Now that I’ve started this blog, I’ve been more interested in seeking out other blogs, and mentions of the National Trust in other peoples blogs. I’ve already left a comment or two where people have expressed frustration with the Trust’s processes behavior, and have offered an insight into what might be behind it. But I’ve also discovered Preservation Nation, from the US National Trust for Historic Preservation. It looks like an offshoot of their Preservavtion Magazine, and I wonder if we should be doing something similar.

That site’s own blogroll leads me to a blog recording the restoration of a building, which is something I feel we should have done as we opened up the new house at Scotney Castle. Another, on the management of President Lincoln’s cottage, talks about scholarly research and conservation techniques. 

There’s also a resource blog, for US National Trust sites, which offers an insight into how they are run (and in contrasts with the way we run the UK (except Scotland) NT. A link from that sites takes me to a specialist blog for Modernist sites. I got all excited about this one, wanting to post a comments directing interest to The Homewood, a modernist building in my region, but then I noticed the blog hadn’t been updated for almost a year.

There are also mentions of the National Trust in in blogs covering subjects as diverse as green issues, family finance (I’m glad to see this one concludes we are good value for money), politics, and sheds!

But the most interesting blog where we get a mention is Past Thinking, which I’m going to have to explore in more depth. The entry that dragged me to it was one about our planned investment in e-engagement, which is indeed very exciting news. We have one of the most visited websites in the charity sector, but in many ways one of the least successful. I heard that that study last year showed that of over seven thousands pages of information, six thousand hadn’t been looked at! The post ends with a plea for the Trust to make resources available via a Creative Commons license (more on this later), which reminds me that Creative Commons was cited in a criticism about the Trust’s last venture into blogging.

Of course, the Trust were the main mover behind the One Day in History Blog a couple of years back, but technically that wasn’t a blog, and is now stored at the British Library (which is my way of saying I can’t find a link to it). I say its not a blog, because surly a blog has to cover more than one day? If there’s any reason for one at all, it is so that ideas can develop over time, rather than being a snapshot. It’s a mighty fine archive I’m sure, but a blog? I don’t think so.

Involving people

Today I visited Mascalls School to meet with a group of young people who will, over the next three years, become our Young Curators at Scotney Castle. The Young Curators project was conceived almost two years ago, when we were first thinking about opening the new house at Scotney.

A bit of history might be useful here. The House and Garden at Scotney Castle were given to the National Trust in 1970 when the owner, Christopher Hussey, a champion of the National Trust and the Country Houses movement, died. His widow lived on until she was 99, and stayed living in the house at Scotney Castle. When she died over two years ago, we began to think about opening the house (called the New House as the remains of the Castle itself, in the garden are thought of as the old house).

From the outset we had a vision of opening the house in a new way. For a start, we wouldn’t sit on it while we conserved it for five years, and then open the finished product to the public. Instead we would open it in stages, letting our visitors watch as we prepared the house for public consumption, and even get involved in defining what the finished product would be. At the same time, we were approached by a local Decorative and Fine Arts Society. They were inspired by a sister society in the North West who had worked with a local museum there to create a group of young  volunteer gallery guides. We discussed the idea of working with a group drawn from across all the year groups at a local secondary school. That way there would be some continuity during the three years of the project, as 18 year olds leaving the group would be replaced by 11 year olds joining it. The problem was, how would we find a school willing to let such a diverse group of students out of lessons at the same time to work with us?

Enter Mascalls, an arts specialist school in Paddock Wood, whose entire student body is organised in just such a way, with over 80 Advisory Groups consisting of around fifteen students from across the age range, rather than the old system of forms and yeargroups.

Over 80, and we were looking for just one… so we had a competition! sent a school a little flyer describing what we wanted to do, and invited expressions of interest from the advisoy groups. The school selected four groups, from those that expressed an interest, to visit Scotney. We introduced them to the house and gardens, then set them a task, to create scrapbook pages, with the help of a “scrapper” paid for by our NADFAS friends.

We judged the groups not only on the quality of the pages they produced, but also on the way they worked together to complete the task, and chose one who will work with us now as our Young Curators.

Today we met with them for the first time in the new capacity. It was an informal chat about what they wanted to get out of the project, because although we have ideas about what we want as an organisation, we also want the project to be led by the young people themselves. What we heard was good:

• They want to be trusted, and given responsibility.
• They want to learn about the National Trust’s responsibilities to conserve beautiful places.
• They want to make Scotney a place that kids drag their parents to, rather than the other way around.
• They want activities that bring them together as a group.
• They want to bring together, and encourage people to make use of, the house, the garden and the wider estate
• They want be given a chance to voice their opinions.
• They want to spend one day a semester (they have five semesters) working with us, plus one midweek spring residential in Scotney’s basecamp.
• They want to bring their own kids (those that plan to have them) back to Scotney in ten years time and be able to say “I did that”

I think we can work with that.