23. A Year in the Life of Elizabeth Gaskell’s House
Posted
21st March 2025
in 10 year Anniversary, blog, Blogs & News, Gaskell House Blogs
17 – 23 March 2025
The sun was shining and the visitors were out in force this week. Hurrah!
Despite my intention to take a break (and a stroll around the ‘grounds’) it never quite happened so I had to be satisfied with a guest blog post about how Elizabeth uses nature in her novels. (Thank you Caroline.)
We started the week with two group tours including a group of 30 staff and volunteers from The Bronte Parsonage Museum. It was lovely to welcome them to Manchester and to give them the tour of the House. Being able to continue the friendship formed by Charlotte and Elizabeth is a real privilege and I love that we continue to partner on online events and generally to support each other. Thanks to all the volunteers who helped with the tours, I know there was some extra homework done in terms of Charlotte and Elizabeth’s friendship!
On our open days we had quite a few volunteers away this week – either on holiday, finishing coursework or otherwise engaged so I (and other staff members) did a fair few shifts in the Tea Room and welcoming visitors on tickets. Katy was in Leeds for an Conference about Accessibility in Museums on Thursday and Friday (thanks to a bursary from Museums Development), so it was a rather lean team on Thursday, but thanks to the flexibility of the volunteers we just about survived.
Liza, one of our Trustees, popped in on Wednesday and gave our retail shop displays a much-needed refresh. It was really good to get a fresh pair of eyes to look at everything and the changes gave us all a boost. We did have very good spend in our Tea Room this week so I’m hopeful the changes have already had an impact. Alongside this, we are also in the process of culling our second-hand book stock (ie clearing the stock we have had for a long time and which isn’t going to sell soon), and so it was also good to see visitors continue to take advantage of our BOGOF on hardback books. I squeezed in some time to meet up with Frank (our ex-chair and accreditation mentor) for a much-needed catch-up and then I helped him perfect the visuals on his upcoming online restoration tour (tickets are still available).
Last week we had two items in the collection (sewing table and fire screen) accidentally damaged by a visitor so there was some discussion with the team this week about next steps. Frank thinks the items can be repaired, but we’ve moved the sewing table out of the Drawing Room in the meantime. Sadly this is one of the risks we have to take as a hands-on museum and thankfully it’s not a regular occurrence. We reminded volunteers about which objects can’t be touched/sat on and suggested ways to stop visitors touching them, without us having to resort to thistles.
Behind the scenes I worked for quite some time on the corrections (mainly tedious commas and punctuation) on our content on the Bloomberg Connect App and ordered marketing material that we can use to promote the App onces it goes live. We also started to chat to the volunteers about using the App and some of the Thursday volunteers downloaded it and started having a look at how it worked.
We hosted a meeting of the Trailblazing Women of Greater Manchester on Thursday morning in the Servants’ Hall and got to hear about the events surrounding International Women’s Day and the annual Margaret Ashton Lecture. (We currently have textiles made by this group on display in the Bronte Room). That evening we had our Board meeting on Zoom so I didn’t lock up till about 7.15pm. Thank goodness for the volunteer biscuit tin and the fact it was well stocked with dark chocolate digestives (thank you Katy).
At the Board meeting, Rana and Rose, our youngest trustees spoke about a project idea they have and then on Friday morning I saw a reel from Kids in Museums on our Instagram which they had contributed to – click here to watch . A very nice way to end the week.
Sally Jastrzebski-Lloyd
