Wrapping up the project: delivering the house trails

An electrified candlestick in the Hall at Lotherton.

An electrified candlestick in the Hall at Lotherton.

As the project comes to an end, we are now ready to unveil the new history of electricity house trails we have produced for Standen and for Lotherton Hall.  These are available to view and to save on our Downloads page, along with a couple of other documents detailing our resources .  These trails have been designed to fit with existing trails used in each house, using templates supplied by the houses.  We are in the process of producing a one-off print run for the houses, which we will send to them, and after that each house will be able to print more as needed.

Each trail gives visitors an idea of the kinds of electrical artefacts and systems present in the house – such as the electrified candlestick at Lotherton Hall, pictured left, and the pressels at Standen, below.  When developing these, it was important for us to get input from house volunteers and guides, as they know best the kinds of things visitors want to know, and the questions they ask, and will be the first point of contact if visitors want to know more about content of the trails.  To get this feedback I visited each house to present early drafts of the trails, and discussed the content with guides and volunteers.  Although with limited space it was not possible to incorporate all suggestions into the finished drafts, it was very useful to run these early versions past the people who interact with visitors on a day-to-day basis.

One useful discussion we had was how much technical detail ought to be included.  There are visitors who appreciate this information – I have met several current or former electrical engineers at various houses over the course of this project myself.  However, we agreed that on the whole visitors do not come for, or expect, electrical history, and so the interpretative content should focus on the social history, with a few details about the technical aspects of the system for those who want this information.  The trails therefore contain a lot of social history content from Professor Gooday’s and Dr. Harrison-Moore’s work as it applies to each of the houses, for example emphasising the significance of class and gender in people’s responses to electrical technologies.  Each makes reference to nineteenth-century fears about electrical accidents, the design of electrical fittings, and the use of electricity for communication within the house.

Pressels: electric buttons on cords, hanging behind the bed in the North Bedroom at Standen.

Pressels: electric buttons on cords, hanging behind the bed in the North Bedroom at Standen.

In addition to these full trails we have also produced a template schools’ resource for Lotherton Hall – a shorter trail with activities – and are also producing a children’s trail for Standen.  The challenge for these resources was to distil some key points out of the research and to convey them in a way which would appeal to a young person moving around the house.  As with most of the work we have produced as part of this project, the key was to focus on the human stories and relatable imagery, such as ladies worried that the bright electric light would be bad for their skin, or unreliable lights going out in the middle of a meal, and where possible to include children or young people – such as the Beale children playing billiards by electric light in the evenings.  Ultimately I believe it is stories like these that are the reason why this research lends itself so well to the various interpretative resources we have produced over the past year.

The new trails will be in use at Lotherton Hall and Standen from July, and are also available to download here.

QR codes in country houses?

QR codeOne 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. We originally thought QR codes placed on an electrical heritage trail might be the way to do this, with each linking to a page on our website corresponding to a different room in the house and enabling visitors to access multimedia interpretative materials. The trail would of course also contain material about each room, and would include an explanation of the content the QR code would link to.

However, something that came out of the first project steering meeting on 18 June, and which has become clearer as I have researched more people’s experiences online, is that the QR code in the heritage sector seems to be a technology which has had its day. Indeed, I think it’s fair to say you don’t see so many of them around anywhere anymore. Feedback from projects at the Brooklyn Museum, New York and the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh has been largely negative, whereas other experiments, for example at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, the Museum of Inuit Art, Toronto and the Museum of English Rural Life, Reading have been reviewed more positively. Overall reactions have been mixed.

Nevertheless, most of the experiences I have come across relate to museums, and not to country houses. A big difference between a museum and a country house is that, when designing a museum exhibition, you are free to utilise and organise the space available however you want. Displays, cases, boards, audiovisual presentation units and the like can be arranged however is most convenient. In a country house on the other hand, the priority tends to be preserving a certain atmosphere of authenticity in the rooms, and this limits curators and educators to stick close to their source material and avoid cluttering the space with too much interpretation.

It could be a bad idea to place too much emphasis on a technology which may already be looking outdated, especially if the resources we produce are to have a long shelf life. The content, however, and the idea of connecting the physical and virtual resources, is still key; as long as the interpretative materials remain available on the website then the gateway through which we make them accessible via the printed materials can be changed. For now though, I’m not sure there exists a better alternative to QR codes – practical within the scope and budget of this project – to accomplish this. In such cases I wonder: is there still a case to be made for QR codes?