Our inaugural season of INTERVENTIONS seminars has now concluded; many thanks to our speakers and attendees. Explore the full programme and highlights from our first run of seminars below.
Past seminars – highlights
26 January 2021, 18:00-19:30 GMT: Working-class identities & the country house
Dr Ben Cowell (Historic Houses) — ‘From Great Estate to the Great State‘
In 1912, the Essex landowner the Countess of Warwick collaborated with H.G. Wells, her tenant, on an edited volume of essays, Socialism and the Great State. ‘The Great State’ here referred to the world as it might be after a Socialist revolution. Lady Warwick’s contribution to the volume imagined a countryside transformed, with workers living contentedly in market towns free of overcrowding and pollution.
Lady Warwick had announced her conversion to socialism in 1904 and remained faithful to the cause until her death in 1938. She put her beliefs into practice through the management of her Essex estate. Warwick invited men from the Salvation Army’s Hadleigh colony to camp in her park at Easton Lodge while they worked on a new garden (to designs by Harold Peto). She established a workshop to train local girls in needlework, and founded a school and an agricultural college. She envisaged that Easton Lodge might eventually become a workers’ college, and attempted (unsuccessfully) to give it to the Trades Union Congress and to the Labour Party.
How could such a wealthy landowner adopt a political cause that was so clearly set against theinterests of her own class? H.G. Wells, who became Lady Warwick’s tenant at Easton Lodge in 1910, traced a more subaltern view of the great estate in the opening chapters of his 1909 novel Tono-Bungay. This paper appraises the Countess of Warwick’s revolt against tradition, and compares it to Wells’ own depictions of country-house life.
Ben Cowell‘s PhD at the University of Nottingham (1998) was on the landscape history of late 18th and early 19th century estates in England. His subsequent published work includes a history of the heritage movement, The Heritage Obsession (2008), a biography of the theorist of the Picturesque, Uvedale Price (with Charles Watkins, 2012), and Landscapes of the National Trust (with Stephen Daniels and Lucy Veale, 2015). He has co-edited (with Elizabeth Baigent) a volume of essays on the life and work of Octavia Hill (2016), and wrote a biography of another of the founders of the National Trust, Sir Robert Hunter. Ben is the Director General of Historic Houses, which represents 1,500 of the UK’s historic houses, castles and gardens, all independently owned.
23 February 2021, 18:00-19:30 GMT: Queering the country house
Anthony Delaney (University of Exeter) — ‘‘Within The Verge of The Rainbow’: The Vyne, John Chute and the Queer Country House‘
The study of eighteenth-century country house domesticity has received significant attention, particularly in post-war historiography, although leading historians have tended to adopt an unproblematic, heteronormative approach in their analysis and, as a result, significant oppositions to these dominant narratives have been too readily excluded. Where scholars have attempted to document the ‘queer country house’ the result has often led to discussions around collecting, taste and fashion, rather than affording these buildings the complexities and ‘snugitude’ of home.
Taking The Vyne in Hampshire, home to John Chute (1701-1776) as a case study, this paper draws on a variety of primary material including correspondence, doodles, inventories, and architectural plans in order to scrutinise the explicit connections between the country house, queer identity formation and domesticity, and offers an alternative to the absoluteness of what might be termed the eighteenth-century ‘homonolithic queer type’ by revealing the importance of the country house as a site of retreat, repose and rejuvenation for nonconforming élite men at the time.
Anthony Delaney is a PhD researcher at the University of Exeter investigating Cotqueans: Queer Domesticity in eighteenth-century England. He recently contributed to the research which informed the National Trust’s Interim Report on the Connections between Colonialism and Properties now in the Care of the National Trust, Including Links with Historic Slavery, which was published in September 2020.
30 March 2021, 18:00-19:30 BST: (De)constructing empire in the country house
Isabel Gilbert (University of Sheffield) — ‘What can British country house museums learn from the plantations of the American South?‘
Historically, heritage organisations and museums have failed, consciously or otherwise, to explore or interpret their connections to the violent and exploitative legacy of British colonialism. In the absence of contextualising interpretation or acknowledgement of the complexity of colonial history, many country house museums exist as polysemic signs, largely understood in a way that is considered conducive to carefully constructed, triumphalist and patriotic narratives. This research explores how the country house could become a more engaging tool with which to explore a diverse range of histories, taking inspiration from work already undertaken by plantation house museums in the United States.
In terms of visitor experience, there are a number of similarities between the British country house and the plantations of the US South. Much like British country houses, plantation house museums must contend with their own well-established narratives of nostalgia and rural simplicity, as well as family legacies and pro-Confederate Civil War memory, in order to address the complexity of their histories. At the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, the conventional focus on the life of the site’s white inhabitants has been subverted in favour of a museum dedicated almost entirely to the experiences of enslaved people. This presentation examines how Whitney, and other counter-narrative sites, have shown that large country houses are a tool or vessel with which any number of stories can be told, and that it is the mandate of the organisations responsible for these places to enable a more complete, complex history to exist.
Isabel Gilbert is a PhD student at the University of Sheffield undertaking research into the interpretation of colonial history across the heritage sector and its role in the perpetuation of systemic racism. Isabel has several years’ experience working in the heritage sector. She is currently a freelance Heritage and Inclusion consultant, working with companies and charitable organisations to provide educational sessions contextualising the Black Lives Matter movement’s recent rise to global prominence, enabling a broader understanding of colonial history and its role in upholding white supremacy. She offers advice on the creation of more inclusive organisational cultures and understanding the difference between performative activism and meaningful allyship.
27April 2021, 18:00-20:00 BST: Creative & artistic interventions in the country house
Victoria Worthington (University of Sheffield & the Devonshire Educational Trust) — ‘Thinking Creatively about Thinking Creatively‘
Studies of the country house have traditionally been concerned with histories of architecture, design and society, with little attention paid to the historic house setting as a locus of learning which extends beyond the wearing of period dress and the memorising of facts. Despite significant interest and expansion in education and outreach activities across charitable and private sectors, there was, until recently, only one publication aimed specifically at teaching within and about country house settings. Published in 1995, the book was one of three titles which sought to highlight the educational and recreational opportunities available to children through the National Trust as part of its centenary year. Its use of text and paper-based resources is reflective of its place in a world yet to discover virtual visits and digitised content, but also of the ways in which country house visits have been, and continue to be, conducted with a focus on what the historic house has been, rather than what it might become.
This project therefore seeks to reshape the traditional view of and visit to the country house, drawing on principles from museum and gallery education which make use of resource-rich settings, freedom to experiment and altered social dynamics that allow them to become active and creative spaces for learning. Using participatory action research, it endeavours to demonstrate the impact of cross-curricular learning outside the classroom on the curiosity, confidence and cognitive skills of pupils, with a view to positioning the country house firmly at the centre of creative learning.
Victoria Worthington is a PhD student at the University of Sheffield exploring the impact of cross-curricular learning opportunities at country houses in partnership with the Devonshire Educational Trust. Prior to undertaking her PhD, Victoria trained as an archaeologist and a teacher, working in primary, secondary and special needs settings before moving into educational publishing. She hopes that this research will act as a vehicle through which she can devise creative and practical solutions for the issues that she faced in promoting arts activities within a national curriculum which outlines what must be taught and when.
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