39. A Year in the Life of Elizabeth Gaskell’s House
Posted
27th July 2025
in 10 year Anniversary, blog, Blogs & News, Gaskell House Blogs
21-27 July 2025
The summer holidays are here and it’s the start of the great six week ‘child-care’ juggle as I call it!
Anyway, Manchester schools only finished mid-week, so although we did offer family activities this week there wasn’t much take-up at the House, although I did spot a lovely picture of Mog and the Hungry Caterpillar on the craft table.
We were steady with visitors all week (and had just enough volunteers) on both Wednesday and Thursday to keep everyone happy and busy. On the volunteer front we had a work experience placement start, did some training with several new volunteers and welcomed back a few familiar faces who we hadn’t seen for a while due to exams and work commitments.
Katy was on leave this week so I had to do a small amount of volunteer admin and emailing (although Katy had prepped everything for me) as Sunday was looking very low. Thankfully managed to get just enough volunteers in the end with me doing a shift in the Tea Room first thing. In the end a few volunteers came in early so it all worked out beautifully. Thank you to all those who responded to the call-out for help.
On Wednesday we had a photographer in the House (the brilliant and lovely Andrew Brooks) to take professional photography of the new exhibition, volunteers in action and general stock photography, which will be useful in the year ahead. I think pretty much all the staff and volunteers were involved (often you’ll just see our hands and backs of heads in shot) and I’d brought my 12 year old daughter* to help.
*Children who have parents who work in small museums are regularly roped into things like this as we don’t have the funds to paid for models! (a perk or a quirk of the job depending on how you see it.) She also helped Gaby make a short film about our family offer which will be going out soon on the socials.
We received the parcel containing the books we sent off for professional repair earlier in the year and had some fun making an unboxing film for social media. The books won’t be going back on the shelves just yet as we want to add new bookplates with the name of their sponsor…. so watch this space.
Monday was a conservation cleaning day for a team of volunteers, big thanks to all involved. Outside of open days we had an unusually quiet week which was quickly filled with marketing the summer workshops, wedding meetings, working on a new funding application, business planning and our monthly Board meeting on Thursday.
I was working on Sunday as the Duty Manager and in-between the usual malarkey managed to email a specialist historic carpet company about getting a quote to do some repairs to our stair carpet, which needs to go into a funding application.
Sally Jastrzebski-Lloyd
