Keeping Albert Happy

Recently my wife and I went to a tourist attraction in Hampshire. We were looking forward to it, it was a quiet day and all was well with the world. 

Then at the ticket office we bumped into Albert and his parents. Now Albert is not his real name, we will protect the innocent here, but he was a young lad, probably about eight years old and an only child. The member of staff on admissions said he'd enjoy the museum  as there were pirates in there, to which Albert looked interested and his parents immediately gave great exaggerated whoops and bending into his face said "How exciting Albert, pirates!"; they also took the child activity trail they were offered.

Now, from experience museum trails can vary considerably in quality and interest but as we had no view of this one we were not going to judge. But Albert was not looking very exited at the prospect of filling in an activity sheet with his amazingly enthusiastic and constantly whooping parents who seemed to think it was essential that each whoop and exclamation of some new found fact should be communicated to Albert, even though he was quite a considerable way away at the other end of the room. It was also part of the enthusiastic whooping that the parents should make every effort to catch our eyes (the only other people in the room) to ensure that they were seen to be educating their child. 

For Jo and I this became excruciating, intrusive and very annoying as we tried to read and take in the information panels. We are all for young children coming to museums, it has been strongly encouraged in our families, but all we could hear were comments such as "Albert! Albert! Come and find three different types of wood!". At this particular point Albert was quite engrossed with a model of a ship and obviously wanted to know more about that with his pointing and asking, rather than looking for three different bits of wood but to no avail - the activity sheet had to be completed.

And so it continued to the point that Jo and I made the decision that this parental noise cloud following us around was too much, so we left the museum to come back later. We spent the next hour plotting a course around the attraction maintaining the maximum distance from Albert's parents.

Because actually it was the parents and not the child causing the problem. It was them not understanding their child's interests and natural discovery of exhibits that was causing the issue, by trying to force him to learn in the way a museum's kids trail had decided. They wanted him to do the children's trail whereas he obviously wanted to find out things in his own way. He was interested in the models and dioramas and his parents would have been better off looking at these with him instead of trying to answer all the questions on an A4 piece of paper.

Many "Children's' Trails" I have experienced are actually quite poor and only designed probably to say there is something to do for children rather than being designed for children. Albert may have been a problem child or just wilful but the parents were not allowing him to find his own level of interest and were spending a great deal of (loud) energy bending him to the fact that the approach they had adopted was the only way to do it (and making sure all around them were seeing that they were "good parents" in doing so).

What can those of us working in Heritage and Tourism learn from this? 

Firstly, try your children's' trail on some real children to see if they find it engaging. Don't make the assumption that what you find interesting or what the message of the museum is will appeal to an ordinary young visitor.

Secondly, adult exhibits and interpretation can stimulate the interest of children, but it is probably better to add in a layer of simpler interpretation for younger visitors to engage with rather than filling in a separate piece of paper that smacks more of school learning than holidays.

Not all child activity trails are poor, but many seem to miss the mark.

We last saw Albert slowly walking back to the car park with two slightly deflated and silent parents. They had given up on the trip. We were glad that our visit was now more peaceful but couldn't help having a little sympathy for Albert, whose growing interest in some exhibits had not been noticed and no doubt he would be going through very similar defined learning exercises again in the future. 

Edward Jenner website now live

The new website for The Edward Jenner Museum in Berkeley has gone live. Designed by Eberlin and produced by Copper Phoenix. Tim Davies, Managing Director of Copper Phoenix said "We're very pleased with the new look of the website that will make it much easier for the museum to communicate to thepublic its facilities, including the ability to hire the Old Cyder House venue - plus of course a wealth of information on Dr Jenner and when to visit the museum!"

Heritage: from chocolate box to concrete box

Series 1 Land Rover, Lacock: B&W
Originally uploaded by CopperPhoenix

From The Times
August 19, 2009
Heritage has democratised and rightly even includes pig-ugly buildings, says the man behind Saving Britain’s Past

Tom Dyckhoff

Heritage used to be easy. It was stately homes. It was cathedrals. It was tea towels in the gift shop and buttered crumpets in a National Trust café. It was nostalgia. Not any more. Over the past 50 years, during which British society and our towns and cities have been utterly transformed, ordinary people have fought to save the streets, buildings and landscapes that mean so much to them. In doing so they have completely revolutionised what we mean by heritage.

Heritage has democratised. These days, it can mean pretty much anything: a coalmine, the childhood homes of the Beatles (now owned by the National Trust), that little café down the road with an interior straight out of Expresso Bongo. It can even be a building which to many is pig-ugly.

Take Robin Hood Gardens. For the past year a battle has been raging in East London over plans by Tower Hamlets to demolish and redevelop this 1960s Brutalist housing estate. Passions run high. Architects and preservationists are pitted against council and developer. Yet if, 40 years ago, you’d have said that this slab of concrete was heritage you’d have been laughed out of the planning department.

To understand how heritage went from chocolate box to concrete box, I’ve been filming a seven-part TV series for BBC Two, Saving Britain’s Past. It was the experience of the Second World War that created our basic understanding of heritage. Before the Blitz there were, astonishingly, no proper systems or records for preserving our buildings and landscapes. There had never been any need, because the British landscape, at least the oldest, most cherished parts of it, had changed so slowly.

Admittedly the Industrial Revolution had so transformed much of the country that the glimmers of a conservation movement emerged through campaigners such as William Morris and his Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, aghast at the modern world’s impact on the old. But compared with what was about to happen, the industrial revolution was small fry.

That all changed when Hitler embarked on not only the Blitz, but also the infamous “Baedeker raids”, a bombing campaign targeting not military or industrial sites, but those of cultural value listed in Baedeker’s guide books. Cities such as York, Exeter, Canterbury and Bath were bombed just because they were beautiful. Looking at the archive footage of Bath’s destruction in April 1942 is a grim task. Besides the human suffering, 19,000 of the city’s buildings were wrecked, including such gems as the Royal Crescent and the Circus.

The attack sent the country into panic, triggering a sense of collective ownership of our landscapes, the same drive that brought into being the welfare state and the NHS. John Betjeman proposed a national buildings record, the Ministry of Works began a salvage scheme of historic buildings that needed urgent repair, and the 1944 Town and Country Planning Act gave birth to the lists — Britain’s first inventory of buildings of national or historic importance, graded I, II and III according to their significance, to be protected.

Heritage was born. The Ministry of Works appointed 30 architectural historians to compile the lists. These were traditional, nostalgic, conservative. Things not quite up to scratch included architecture from most of the previous century, certainly all things vulgarly industrial. But at least it meant that what Britain looked like in the future would no longer be left to chance or be so vulnerable to attack.
What is remarkable is not simply the country’s speedy acceptance of the idea of saving heritage, but how enthusiastically we have done so. We are an intensely nostalgic country, especially in our post-imperial decline. Yet conservation is not always conservative. It can be downright radical.

Ever since it was invented, this cosy idea of heritage has been whittled away by those it excluded. Just as our understanding of history has diversified from kings, queens and great men to the social history of ordinary people, so what we choose to feel passionate about has shifted from cathedrals and castles to the 1950s cafés in which our quiffed teenaged mums and dads tried to be cool; to the coalmines some slaved in, and the council estates many lived in. My heritage wasn’t a 14th-century village church or a Georgian mansion but a postwar school built by the Hertfordshire schools building programme, a strikingly modern place jam-packed with welfare-state optimism. Can’t that be preserved alongside the 14th-century village church? Why can’t the everyday landscapes most of us live in be heritage?

These ideas began to arise in the mid-1960s just when British society was loosening up and admitting grammar-school politicians, gay playwrights and working-class pop starlets to its higher echelons. They even came up in Bath. As the council started tearing down Grade III listed Georgian streets — the only grade then not legally protected — not even the nascent heritage bodies noticed. But ordinary people did. In the mid-1960s Peter Coard began drawing the little human quirks of the artisans’ cottages and shopfronts disappearing around him and co-founded the Bath Buildings Record. It took another decade for cultural grandees such as Kenneth Clark to catch up with this battle by the little people. Coard unearthed a brutal fact: there was a class system in heritage.
In London John Betjeman became the first secretary of the Victorian Society in 1958, but it took another decade for the Victorian to be thought of as anything but vulgarly industrial. In early 1970s London an alliance as radical as CND or the antiVietnam rallies, of Marxist activists, gentrifiers, old market porters and West End actors inflicted the first big defeat against the planning establishment, saving Covent Garden from being transformed by the Greater London Council into Alphaville.

Since then, we’ve started listing everything, and Britain has become a museum obsessed with its past. The real turning point came in the 1970s when economic decline slowed the pace of the wrecking ball. “A recession,” Roy Strong whispered to me, “is terribly good for heritage.”

Today a recession is proving good for heritage once more. Cranes have stopped swinging in our cities. Visits to National Trust properties this year are up an incredible 24 per cent. Battles, though, are still raging. The front line these days might be Brutalist bruisers such as Robin Hood Gardens. It might be with the kinds of histories we tell through our buildings. In February, the environmentalist George Monbiot launched an excoriating attack on the cute “tea towel” histories told in too many stately homes, which ignore the hidden tales of land seizure and fortunes made through slavery. One thing’s for certain though. We now know that heritage isn’t so much about what we preserve, but why we preserve it. It isn’t just about architecture. It’s about the people who live in it.

Co-Op and Edward Jenner Museum in an English Country Garden

On 30^th June 2009, 14 volunteer gardeners are visiting Berkeley for the day to give the Edward Jenner Museum a tidy-up/make-over in Jenner’s former garden. The Museum run by a charitable trust is the Co-Op’s chosen recipient for assistance this year out of the whole Mid-counties region, which has delighted staff at the famous Gloucestershire attraction.

As part of the Co-op ethos staff have to do ‘community hours’ which must go towards a worthwhile project. Museum Director Sarah Parker said: We are very grateful to the Co-op team for their most generous offer to help us in our efforts to improve and renovate our garden. We hope eventually to re-plant Jenner’s garden to as it was in the 18/19^th Century. We are working with garden designer, Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall on the project but need support, research and as a charity, above all funds.

The Museum currently operates with one part-time Gardener/Maintenance Manager who apart from looking after nearly one acre of garden, also looks after Edward Jenner’s 200 year old vine, planted from cuttings taken from the world’s oldest vine at Hampton Court Palace in 1801. The delicious dessert grapes (Black Hamburg) will be on sale at the museum from August and cuttings are also available.

The assistance the Co-Op volunteers will provide is an immense boost to the Museum’s “outdoor look”. After the Co-Op team has left long-term volunteers in the garden are needed for ongoing assistance and the Museum is looking for an Apprentice Vine-Keeper, to learn the ancient craft of vine-keeping.

Jenner himself apparently experimented with blood as fertilizer and was a keen gardener, along with his world famous medical research activities.

This year celebrates the 260^th anniversary of Edward Jenner’s birth and his garden has one noticeable scar on the lawn. The trench left by the University of Bristol’s archeological dig is being left open for visitors to see Saxon Berkeley. Sarah Parker said We doubt that Jenner would have been aware of how much history was under his lawn!