34. A Year in the Life of Elizabeth Gaskell’s House
Posted
23rd June 2025
in 10 year Anniversary, blog, Blogs & News, Gaskell House Blogs
16-20 June 2025
I’ve not been in the House since Sunday 15 June as I was at the annual AIM (Association of Independent Museums) Conference at the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth for 3 nights.
With the hot weather returning, we saw our visitor numbers drop once again although perhaps not quite as bad as some days in early May as we also had two private group tours on Tuesday and a school group to welcome on Friday. This hot weather is also my opportunity (again) to tell people we’ve got our Victorian air conditioning switched on! (ha ha ha), as it stays quite cool in the House.
Wednesday was fine for volunteers, but we were again low on volunteers on Thursday so had to resort to our emergency plan that involves giving visitors guided, rather than self-guided, tours of the House. It all worked out well by the sounds of it with good Tea Room and shop sales, which tend to reflect a positive visitor experience.
On Friday we hosted a visit from 60 children from St John’s Primary School (which is a short walk from the House) in two sessions. Thanks to Ellie and the volunteers leading on this and ending our week in a lively fashion.
As mentioned I’ve had a light touch at the House this week as I have been busy soaking up ideas and inspiration from a wide range of other independent museums including the Mary Rose Museum itself down in Portsmouth. I was very lucky to get a behind the scenes tour of the stores of the Mary Rose collection (seeing the thousands of items not on display was incredible). The museum’s historical and current stories and those shared by their team were really useful! I also car-shared with my counterpart, Belinda, from Salford’s Working Class Movement Library – so there was lots of museum talk generally. We spent some of the 5 hour journey listening to the audiobook of Brian Groom’s, Made in Manchester, which provoked lots of other interesting conversations.
Tuesday and Friday for me was spent editing, proofing, proofing again and signing off the final pieces of exhibition interpretation for I’ve Never Read Elizabeth Gaskell, catching-up with various partners from the project, updating project plans, approving invoices, booking in some repair work needed for our alarm system and other marketing for the exhibition – including sorting out the delivery of our leaflets.
Sally Jastrzebski-Lloyd
