I've never been described as ecumenical before. Thank you, Ali.
So I know this has been a tumultuous years, but many people have mentioned that I'm sorry I missed Friday.
As you know, I've been quite tied up, probably tied up with other things in the National Trust.
And somebody speaking today might put my hat on as a cultural historian,
art historian and curator and heritage practitioner and someone who has learnt firsthand very much the hard way recently.
How emotionally fraught political charr politically charged the space in which heritage presently sits is.
So that's something I'm really kind of in the back of my mind as I as I speak about this.
So I decided that trying to talk about the entire national trust in 20 minutes was a little bit too overambitious.
And this is some work that I was thinking about before COGAT hit, really wanting to put together a Birkins project around spare's magic,
supernatural folklore and the National Trust property for a very curatorial perspective,
but really thinking about how I can approach that with my colleagues and with partners.
So really happy to discuss ideas of people either at the end of this or out of this forum.
So what I'm going to look at today, I'm going to focus on one of our places, one of our properties,
which is Snowsill Manor, which has many of you may know, which is near Broadway in the North Cotswolds.
And it's a private collection of unique individual and collector.
For me, it raises many questions about how we connect to the unseen and the forgotten and the intangible in our places.
And there's just a variety of objects which I'll talk about a bit more on this screen.
So really, this presentation today is an opening exploration and really set of very open questions
around how at the trust we or I might approach the spaces in between the hidden,
the occluded, the ineffable, the intangible and the forgotten.
How we use those ideas, narratives and experiences to unlock the objects, collection spaces, buildings, gardens,
parklands and landscapes we care for and create new ways and connexions between individuals and communities and the
way they're able to connect with these places and and collections and landscapes in ways that go beyond the visual.
And which is something we've really relied long on along.
So we relied on a lot in the past and beyond what some what some heritage theorists have called the authorised heritage experience.
So today I'm taking on my very unauthorised curators heritage tour of Snow's Hill Manor.
For me, it's a site where magic was deliberately excluded by the National Trust when it took it on in the 1950s.
The collections that were regarded as most problematic and magical were were handed over on indefinite loan to Cecil Williamson.
The Witchcraft Museum in the 1960s. And that really was a deliberate attempt to negate those narratives.
And then the witches garrets, which is quite famous and hardly anyone sees it.
So I'm going to show you today remains hidden from visitors today.
And that's partly because it's not very accessible. But also it hasn't been part of the mainstream narratives.
The trust of wisht present in the past. And now as head curator, that's something I really do want to address.
So this is Snow's health. This is a pic I took about exactly a year ago, actually on a visit.
And I do apologise some of these my my own pictures and professional ones.
So Snow's Hellman is a 16th century Cotswold manor house, very traditional,
purchased by architect, artist and designer Charles Padget Wade, whose dates are 1883 to 1956.
He bought in 1919 when he returned from the First World War.
And he donated it to the National Trust in 1951 when he moved permanently to St. Kitts for health reasons.
Today, the experience, if you visit the trust,
is largely ticketed because it's only small and narrow and there's lots of objects and largely self guided as well.
So this is a picture of Wade in 1932, actually on St. Kitts at the Children's Tea Party at his is one of his estates.
So Wade inherited his father's ContiTech considerable stake in the family's sugar plantations in St. Kitts in 1911.
And that meant he could give up his career as an architect.
The plantations you'd be unsuppressed know, originally worked by enslaved Africans and the weight family received compensation in the 18th thirties.
Wade himself was bi racial as his grandmother was a free woman of colour from St. Kitts.
There's quite a complex and involved story. I won't go into too much today for obvious reasons.
So these are some amazing pictures of Wade.
He was a conscripts conscripted into the First World War and was very traumatised by the horrors he saw, obviously, although he wasn't active service.
He was mostly an artist and recording what he saw.
And whilst he was still in France, he saw that Snow's Hill Manor was up for sale and bought it, despite it being in a very poor state.
He went to a place to escape the horror and to live out his artistic fantasies and to seek to gain control of life again in a very performative space.
And it was a very performative space where he was the main architect, so to speak,
and the garden just came back, which you can just see a little bit of there in that image I took.
That was some he co designed with the very famous leading arts and crafts architect and designer, Hugh.
So make McKay, Hugh Bailey Scott. And he really saw the garden as an extension of the house.
So I weighed a mass here, a huge, eclectic collections.
I should just go back here. And one of those is the most important dress collections in the country.
And it's something we still haven't properly explored in terms of some of the outstanding amount of historic dress there.
It's incredible. But he wasn't collecting as a dress collector as part of his fantasy world of dressing up.
Of surprising he's to invite people round for fancy dress parties and really for.
And you can see some of him dressed up in some of his many, many guises here.
But there are some extremely important objects in that.
He was also a collector, lots of objects, some of which he'd inherited and some which he purchased suspiciously.
So especially after the 1938 when he'd made an agreement with a national trust to take the House,
he was went mad collecting excuse me, excuse a term he had just really collected and doubled the size of the collection.
So he was very much fascinated by objects made by skilled crafts people, and he did create objects and art himself.
Actually, that picture on the left hand corner in the grey hats when he painted himself and he really set out to create a series of spaces.
So the main manor house here didn't actually live in. He lived in the priest's house next to it.
It was a really good set of spaces where both interior exterior could be a delivery stage backdrops for his collection.
And for him to inhabit. And he used to use the sort of fabric of the manor to great effect.
There were secret passages and entrances and the places it was supposed to be or is supposed to be haunted.
And so he would take great joy in dressing up in historic historical dress,
sneaking through a passageway and then surprising people probably terrifying them out of their minds as he would appear from as if from nowhere.
So there's something about using their uncanny and very much performing in that space.
And so these are some objects he actually made himself. These are the alchemist knishes from 1922 and which really.
Very much so. Sum up his very theatrical and also sort of magical approach.
So what I sort of I'm positing here really is that part of that immersive experience that he offered was
sort of deliberate staging of a house as a series of romanticised occult or magical spaces and objects.
And just to show you a few things here. So this is the witches garret, which most people have never seen.
It's very inaccessible on the pitch.
On the right, you can just see my colleague, his head of interpretation at the trust, disappearing through quite a small hole.
And in it there's a magic circle. And then you can just see the back and I'll show some more close up pictures, some art he created.
And I haven't yet located the Atlas or or Hercules holding the ordinary sphere.
I haven't located the manuscript that comes from. But the Mandrax, which I'll show you close up in a moment.
They are based on, I believe, on the mediaeval herbal. The got dickason tight from fourteen eighty five.
And the Magic Circle as well was based on a very specific manuscript also from the 15th century.
So this is an old picture. This is the only picture you can see online on the left of the which is garrets.
This is on the left again, image not available online. The design for the witch's circle.
And yes, it tells you the manuscript. It came from apparently an 18th century manuscript, actually.
And then on the right, you can just see the picture. It's not very easy to take pictures and it's very dark.
The entire house said this is a picture I took of that magic circle, which is still sort of intact.
And I just think it's a really interesting proposition. Who knows?
I do not know. He is a magical practitioner. I found. No. There's no evidence of that.
Obviously, that's trying to find evidence of these things. But certainly he wasn't.
As far as we know, a member of any of the sort of magical groups where we know who many of the members were.
But that doesn't mean he wasn't perhaps a practitioner. But so and I think it really matters, to be honest to me.
It's really thinking about these spaces as a very performative, magical or romanticised, magical space.
And it's clear that he was very attuned to a lot of manuscripts and use these
as his his source material is going to run through a few more objects here.
So this is a close up excuse. The wrapped objects in tissue paper, the bottom when these are taken, the house was completely closed.
And, you know, my experience of this house is very different from most people's because I
was basically given a key and allowed to run around and do whatever I wanted.
So it's less orchestrated and far freer than many people's experiences.
And so you can see the at the Atlas or Hercules figure and then the two Mandrake
figures that come from that 15th century manuscript I was sort of speaking about.
So it was definitely very stage space here. And this is the what's known as the unicorn clock,
and you can just see in the right hand corner at the bottom the table of scale and there's a tarot card, images based on the Marseilles tarot.
And I'm just I just. And these are still on the wall and not great condition.
It's very damp house and this is sort of applied paper. But we do also have the designs for these as well.
And there's a three at the design. So he drew them himself very much based on that Marseilles deck.
And just a few other objects. I mean, he's extremely eclectic collector.
But there does seem to be a focus on objects that have a sort of magical or ineffable bent on the left is a a witch's bottle,
whether that's a sort of, I suppose, a heritage we created, which is Warhol or a a genuine one.
I'm not sure it's one of the ones that has silks, very fine silk threads,
which are supposed to tangle up the which he is trying to attack your property.
And on the right, that's a relic quiffs and Ignatius.
So is a wide selection of objects from all over the world as well.
And I'll come to that at the end, actually, in how we think about, I suppose, magical or supposedly magical objects from other cultures.
That's something I still want to explore. I think it's quite interesting.
And then the objects in the collection become quite disconnected from their original
contexts and meanings and the reconfigures in entirely different sort of magical space here.
And this sort of cant continue to the outside. We've got the icons so I can't pronounce it.
Cimarron Zodiac Clock, which the metalworks by George Hart, who's from the Guild of Handicraft.
So who's very interested in astrological and astronomical time, I think, rather than linear time.
I'm going to talk about that in a moment. And an artillery spiffier sundial that he has outside, which I think has to have been taken inside.
Now. And again, a great interest in these are military spheres and these that's not left the picture I snapped when I was there.
And that's another another image on the right is also in the collection.
So I think it's interesting.
Sort of weighed. It sort of transforms himself rather than this eccentric architect was his position now.
He was heir to a sugar fortune. He sort of gives us a sense of metamorphosis into this costume source who are conducting the playful rites of
transformation in a series of spaces where friends as well could escape the every day and stand outside of time again.
As mentioned earlier, that sort of rejection of modernity and the sort of linear passage of time.
And I think there's he he he has so many objects that relate to sort of cyclical time or astrological or astronomical time,
not interested in that sort of linear, linear time of modernity. And has an interest.
Really nice anecdote about John Buchan, the author driving Virginia Woolf, as you do to visit Snow's Hill,
not Schwartz in the 20s or 30s, because he saw it as the most extraordinary place he knew, Wolf.
And she was extremely cross when she missed her train home because despite there being hundreds of timepieces in the house,
waited, not sat a single one to the correct time. And he was clearly far more interested in this sort of way to notions of time.
So waits, collecting, creating and commissioning evocative magical objects feels like a way of standing outside of the relentless drive of modernity.
And I think very much that's that sort of driver. Modernity was a pity most by the war he saw and survived.
And I think it's quite interesting as House of Citzen,
a similar but different space from the many architects and designers in the late 19th and early 20th century who sought to create arts and crafts,
utopias and ways. One was very different.
It was less idealistic and more one of playfulness than fantasy.
So what doesn't doesn't work is those hurlers, as it sort of sits at the moment.
In many ways, it's a very charming experience. But I'm very aware that having been given the key to the door when it was closed,
the public and allowed to sort of run around essentially obscene, a very careful curatorial and concerted conservative way.
And I got to experience the amazing which has Garret and go up there.
I know I've had a very different experience, mother visitors that present the house very much, I think, as as.
It relies on the mass display of objects and very dim lighting to make it otherworldly.
And you can see this is not in the main manner. This image here is the bedroom and Wade's own bedroom, which is in the separate priest's house.
So basically the supposed to the house itself was a site of these sort of magical rooms.
But also he carried that on into his living space in the priest's house and later on with his wife, Mary, and from the 1930s.
But even for me, with my privileged experience and knowledge and understanding of some of the collections without the magician animating those spaces.
The rooms and objects feel they sit there rather silently, like dusty spectres.
So what I'm interested in exploring this is partly sort of academic and also partly just thinking about this to experience.
How can visitors have a truly embodied, playful and multisensory and magical experience that brings out those hidden stories?
And, you know,
this is something think about applying across the trust that allows the glimpse of the hidden corridors behind the walls and the witch's garret.
How can this be incorporated into sort of the multiple layered narratives that we want to present at our places?
How can we connect the houses, the house and gardens to that have always focussed on Wade's history?
Can we connect those to the wider histories of the property?
As so many other stories around this house are just kind of get negated almost by the sort of dominant narrative of moving on?
Lets me. And the room in the right, which is known as Anna's room, all all the rooms are named by Reweight himself, is said to be haunted.
Unsurprisingly, the room is named for a 16 year old young woman, Could and Palmer,
who June 16, 04, eloped to the manor, which was a house of a friend with her lover, Anthony.
And where they were quickly married by local vicar secret lovers who unfortunately caught because
she was already promised to another by Anne's guardian and apparently tried by the Star Chamber.
And we don't know what the outcome of that trial was. But that story itself has become part of the wage magical mythos of the property.
Apparently, he took a little scraping off the wood beam and sent it to renowned medium on the south coast who weighed claims.
Never heard of Snowsill, but on examining the timber, she described it as late at night.
In it, a girl in a green dress of the 17th century, much agitated pieces up and down.
She does not live there and will not stay the night.
And then Wade claims it was some years later he saw papers describing the Star Chamber case relating to Seep Krip marriage of Anne Parsons.
So we know how much that's him creating this mythos and how much it could be actual event.
Who knows? Is a great yarn.
But there are other ghosts in the house, apparently, such as a Zenith room on the left, which is the site of a bloody jewel.
There's a Benedictine monk from the time when Snow's Hill was part of which come at Abbey and that of Charles Marshall,
who lived at the manor in the first half of the 19th century and whose ghost apparently led his widow to a buried fortunes,
allowed her to update the house. So these those ghost, hence the overlooked nature of the man, as longer history of as part of the unique cults,
what Cotswolds cultural landscape is time as part of the lands of the church,
its previous residents and workers, and its connexion to the myths and stories of the place is rooted in these connexions be
recovered just as we're recovering the secrets of the spaces and collections in the house.
And at the moment, the National Trust is we've been finalising significant frameworks practically around buildings and collections.
So how do we think about significance in farm in a broader sense than the material which has often been done in the past,
or the sort of fame or the cost of objects? We still need to approach landscapes such and those frameworks.
So folklore, spiritual and community experience is part of those new frameworks that we're looking at.
But how do we think of the significance of the spaces in between the places that are less
tangible and of those stories and or traditions and hidden and transient meanings and events?
Most are interested in how can spaces like this really sort of ramp up the effects?
And embodied experience. How do we think about presence? In many ways, you know, Wade is the great presence in this house at the moment.
But he's an absence as well.
Can this be done through sort of more experientially multisensory approaches rather than sort predicated on the visual, which is at the moment?
And one thing I'm particularly interested in here is how do you approach presenting the uncanny and spiritual heritage,
particularly objects with global histories?
And this is a Balinese mask, again, relating to stories around witchcraft and which are worn in traditional barong dances,
is still performed in Bali and depict the battle between good and evil.
And there's lots and lots of masks and tickly barley's masks for objects from all over the world in this collection.
This is a a Siamese with what's called a Siamese magician's hat in in currently and are very poorly written record.
And I've been speaking to friend only this morning who used to live in Thailand.
And we've sort of because that whole aspect of Thai magic sort of before it became incorporated with Buddhism is is almost forgotten.
We were just wondering what sources we could possibly look to.
And if you see on the bottom of the underneath room, there's sacred geometry, which is very much like the succulent,
magical tattering if people are familiar of that, which is still practised today by Buddhist monks.
And for me, the moment there is a real failure here,
particularly in this room with incredible collection of Japanese samurai armour and the way it's presented,
which I believe is probably similar to the way that Wade presented it,
in that the sort of dim lighting that she used her out the house and this kind of uncanny and spooky presentation.
Effectively, Oriental's is in others. This presentation of this and really, you know,
it doesn't give those objects themselves justice is something that we're particularly looking at at the moment.
And for me, this is a real, real failure here that we have to be sensitive to to objects.
But where these are, you know, these are cultural objects of warfare and and a particular group of people in Japan,
they are not spooky objects, but they're presented as such. And it's very deep, certainly problematic.
And to come full circle, really, from talking about the sort of origins of where the wealth are paid for this house,
how do we present the ghosts of Padget ways, enslaved ancestors and of the people his English family enslaved in St. Kitts?
Thank you.