24. A Year in the life of Elizabeth Gaskell’s House
Posted
28th March 2025
in 10 year Anniversary, blog, Blogs & News, Gaskell House Blogs
24 – 28 March 2025
This week had another two student groups filming at the House at the start of the week – the last of five hires in the past month. We’ve become a film-location microcosm, if only for the month of March!
It was the deadline for applications for the role of Hires and Events Manager on Sunday so a lot of time this week was spent short listing candidates and inviting those successful to interview on 4 April. Thank you to all who applied and good luck to those being interviewed next week.
Excitingly, Elizabeth Gaskell’s House went live on the (free) Bloomberg Connect App on Wednesday (whilst I was on leave). We haven’t started to promote this yet – but we will be starting to shout about it later in April once we’ve trained our volunteers and got some new signage and imagery ready. I appreciate that I’m starting to sound like I work for Bloomberg – the number of people I’ve told to download the app and I even pointed out that a cathedral a colleague was visiting during her week off was on the app. If only I was paid commission…
Our online education/events programme has been short listed for the Historic Houses Frances Garnham Award 2025 and we had to answer a few additional questions and arrange for a judges visit in the coming month. And as if to demonstrate the point we had a very successful online talk this week on Motherhood on Wednesday- with over 100 people joining us online to discuss the the good, the bad and the tolerable mothers in the literature we love.
Thursday was a busy day all round – lots of visitors but we were a little short on volunteers, so I did a few shifts in the Tea Room in the afternoon whilst Katy worked on the new retail displays. Ash, who is on an supported Internship at the House with Pinc College, made a lot of hot buttered crumpets in the morning. We loved seeing a post from Pinc College on Friday which celebrated ‘National Supported Internship Day’ with a photo of Ash volunteering in the Tea Room (see below)
Alex, our chair, and I met with our insurance brokers on Thursday morning to discuss our new rates. (worth noting is costs us £12,000 a year in insurance costs – so whilst not the most exciting, its an important meeting with lots of questions to ask.) and then we were both on Zoom later in the afternoon for a meeting with a consultant (funded via AIM) to discuss a turnaround strategy for the organisation. Ellie was also in meeting on Thursday morning- the first planning meeting for the Oxford Road Cultural welcome week planned for October. She’s going to be speaking to all our student volunteers in the next few weeks to see if they have any ideas.
After work on Thursday I headed to Station South in Levenshulme for the launch of a new banner made by the Trailblazing Women of Greater Manchester switchers group. The new banner made for International Women’s Day celebrates the working women of Manchester’s past including box makers, handkerchief hemmers, rubber workers and fascinatingly, a female weight-lifter who worked in the music halls. The banner will be on display at the House from later this month in the Bronte Room.
For me, Friday was another meeting with a trustee working group to discuss the wedding offer, pricing and staffing and then it was planning for next week – including trying to put the finishes touches to another funding application and confirming filming plans with the crew and our writers in residents on Monday.
NB- Out in the garden the front boarder had fully burst into bloom! (photo below)
Sally Jastrzebski-Lloyd
