47. A Year in the Life of Elizabeth Gaskell’s House
Posted
26th September 2025
in 10 year Anniversary, blog, Blogs & News, Gaskell House Blogs
22-26 October 2025
My second-to-last blog for the year – can’t quite believe we have almost done a full year and that the 10-year anniversary is almost at an end.
Funding applications, namely the MCC Cultural Partnership Grant application, have been all consuming this week – endless typing, researching, checking and rewriting/editing. I felt like a mole coming out into the sunlight when I stopped on Monday afternoon.
Tuesday, I was in the House as Duty Manager for a private tour for 14 people (Stockport U3A) and managed to do some more work on the grant application. Tuesday evening was also when Michael Portillo’s 200 Years of the Railways was broadcast on BBC2, which featured one of our volunteers, Diane Duffy, talking about the railway journey taken by Mary Barton in the novel of the same name and Elizabeth’s own train travels. The footage of Manchester and Liverpool looked fantastic, and Diane did a great job.
Wednesday/Thursday we were a little low on volunteers and also a staff team member down, but we did manage to have our staff planning meeting for Christmas (exciting!) and it was good to see the promotion for the Oxford Road Cultural Welcome Week (8-12 October) go live (thanks Ellie). It was Freshers Week this week, so Oxford Road itself was crammed with students in the autumn sunshine, and we welcomed 28 students from MUU to the House for a tour on Thursday.
We had delivery of our brand new mugs (photo below) along with cake and other food/drinks deliveries – stocking us up for the next few weeks. Over in accounts and speaking of stock, Yasmin made a start on planning our annual stocktake for our end of year (end of October).
Wednesday evening was our online talk: Fashion in North and South. It was given by a brand new speaker, Gabby. I managed to catch-up with the recording on Friday afternoon (I’m listening whilst writing this blog) and I loved it.
On Thursday we had an IT audit of all our PCs and laptops to check everything could cope with Microsoft 11 – there were no big surprises, just confirmation that my work PC is too old to upgrade to Microsoft 11 (it is dreadfully slow so this wasn’t unexpected). So that’s another thing on the list of things we need to identify funding for and my PC can limp on until then.
Katy and I made a start reviewing our Accessibility Policy and updating the plan for the next 12 months. This is really well timed as Katy is in the midst of an accessibility in museums cohort training programme with Museum Development North so she had lots of ideas and things to add, both aspirational (with funding) and concrete, that we can doing in the coming months.
The email for the new event programme – First Edition Thursday – went out. This has been devised and led by Gaby and starts next week. We are all looking forward to getting a close look at these first editions.
Sally Jastrzebski-Lloyd
