11. A Year in the Life of Elizabeth Gaskell’s House
Posted
23rd December 2024
in 10 year Anniversary, blog, blogsNnews, Gaskell House Blogs, other
Week 11. 16 – 23 December 2024
This is my last entry of 2025 as I finish today to take a break for Christmas until 2 January. We closed to the public from 18 December, so over the past week there has been a lot of cleaning, housekeeping, clearing out, shredding and general end of year ‘stuff’ to get through for us all. However my first job on Monday 16th was updating the banner on the website to remind visitors that we are closed and to make sure Google etc. were similarly updated.
Massive thanks to those volunteers who came in to help deep clean the kitchen on Tuesday, to catalogue books and Jane B for collecting all the table cloths (including the large one from the Dining Room) and taking them to be cleaned. Katy reprinted copies of the room folder inserts (which were looking very tatty!) and we replaced some of the worn-out facsimiles of Elizabeth’s letters and transcripts that are on display in the Dining Room. Everyone (staff and volunteers) were clearly flagging this week, energy levels were low across the board (myself included), but we slowly got things ticked off the list.
On Monday I drove into the city centre to the Manchester Literature Festival offices to meet with Cathy and Sarah-Jane, and to pick up three boxes of books for our second-hand book sale. It was a good opportunity also to have a catch-up and to see how we can work together in 2025. (Plus – Look out for the new stock in January’s book-sale – there’s some great stock.) Whilst I was negotiating city centre traffic, Katy and Lucy met with the volunteer working group who will be leading on our 10-year anniversary volunteer event in February to discuss ideas and a plan for the event.
There was another new blog to share on Tuesday about a new book donation that’s come into our collection (Thanks Jane M) and I started to draft some copy for our annual impact report – pulling together all the new stores, key achievements and projects we have done during 2024. The events promotions for 2025 was also sent to the designer (for the table talkers and loo signage) so there was proofing and printing to be done this week as well.
After taking down the Christmas decorations on Tuesday, Katy reset the retail displays in the Tea Room and got the January sale display set up for 2 January. Our first day back will be our first open day of 2025 so we need to make sure we are all ready to go. Similarly on Monday 23rd Jane came back to the House with all the clean tablecloths and repaired textiles – thanks Jane!
On Wednesday I met with the film production company, who will be involved in the Writers Residency, on Zoom. I submitted our annual claim to Historic Houses which involved, amongst other things, counting up all the Historic House members we have had in the year so we can claim back some money from them (we had over 200 members visit us in the past 12 months).
We closed up just after lunch on Wednesday and some of the staff team headed into the city centre for a game of adventure golf at Putters in the Arndale Centre, followed by food and a ‘few’ drinks at Mackie Major. (Not going to mention the fact that I bagged a win on the last hole – photos below!)
On Thursday we held our first steering group meeting for the Writers Residency at lunch time – this includes our Chair, Alex, Ivan from City of Literature, one of our young trustees (Rose) and one of our younger volunteers (Duncan). This was an introduction for everyone and we ran through the timescales. Then I headed in to the city centre (third time this week for me) to meet up with colleagues from the Pankhurst Centre and the Working Class Movement Library for a celebratory Christmas catch-up.
Friday and Monday were largely admin days for me – I finished the copy for the Annual Impact Report and sent it to one of our Trustees for further work in the new year. On Friday the room hire development working group met on Zoom. This small group of trustees and staff are working on a plan to increase the number of room hires we get at the House. I also had a coaching session as part of the AIM Spark Leadership programme I’m doing, which was a very insightful session and gave me lots to think about.
Finally, thank you to Lucy and Ellie who closed up the House on Monday – which involves things like re-setting the heating, emptying the bins and clearing the fridge!
And that’s us done for 2024!
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Sally Jastrzebski-Lloyd
