Electrifying the Country House
Educational resources on the history of domestic electricity.
One of the original aims of this project has always been to try to provide visitors to country houses with layered interpretation, ideally linking paper resources such as trails with digital resources online, such as videos, animations and supplementary text.
I’m very excited to announce that, in December, a group of 3rd year musical theatre students from the School of Performance and Cultural Industries will, as part of their course, be staging a musical inspired by material from Graeme’s book.
On a recent visit to Lotherton Hall, it occurred to me that the man credited with bringing electric lighting to the house in 1903, the owner Colonel Frederick R. T. Trench-Gascoigne, was also keen on other modern technologies.
Welcome to the project blog for ‘Electrifying the country house’. Over the next 11 months I shall post updates here regarding the progress of the project in order to provide a real-time record of our activities.
Here you will find a list of our events and activities over the course of the project and beyond. Please also see the ‘Events’ category of our blog for more details. Date Location Activity Monday 24 – Thursday 27 August 2015 Lotherton Hall Old Science Week: a themed week at Lotherton Hall with workshops for … Read more
Please direct all queries to the project researcher, Michael Kay. Professor Graeme Gooday – Principal Investigator Professor of History of Science and Technology, School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science, University of Leeds Dr. Abigail Harrison Moore – Co-Investigator Senior lecturer, School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds … Read more
Here you can access some of the resources we have produced over the course of the project. Read a guide to our video content, including YouTube links to our online interactive videos, Electrified: the musical, and our Lotherton Electrified short film. Download a supporting document for our three Cragside animations, including YouTube links. See our … Read more
The ‘Electrifying the country house’ project is a collaboration between the University of Leeds and three country houses. Click on the images below to find out more about each house. Cragside, Morpeth Lotherton Hall, Aberford Standen, East Grinstead
Background Electrical appliances and systems were first used in the domestic sphere, in the 1870s and 1880s. At this time, it was country houses which provided some of the earliest venues for electrical innovation and experimentation. Such householders could often afford to invest in this new and somewhat mysterious technology; nevertheless not all chose to, … Read more