POETRY, HERITAGE, COMMUNITY: English Heritage and the University of Oxford in creative collaboration

On Friday night 5th June, three young poets stepped onto the stage in the Schwarzman Centre’s theatre. Each read out their own prize-winning poems inspired by an English Heritage site. One spoke of Peveril Castle’s enduring legacy, another of Tintagel’s rough sea scape, the youngest (aged 12) in her brilliant piece ‘Extension’ ventriloquised Eltham Palace’s surprised response to its own metamorphosis from medieval stone to art deco polished chrome. This poetry competition, hosted by Oxford’s English Faculty, TORCH and English Heritage, attracting nearly 170 entries, showed the power of poetry, both old and newly created, to connect young people with history and heritage.

The Poetry Festival marked the culmination of Poetry, Heritage, and Community, an eighteen-month collaborative project between Oxford University and English Heritage, supported by John Fell and English Heritage funding. The project emerged from my earlier 2022-3 TORCH KEF collaboration with English Heritage on the literary legacy of Wrest Park. The highlight of that year-long project involved Lady Margaret Hall students’ production of a 1797 manuscript aristocratic children’s play, The Woodcutter. We took the play on tour to the stately homes where it had originally been performed (Wrest Park and Wimpole Hall). Site visitors loved watching the students perform the play. Many of my students had never set foot before in a stately home, and I was struck by the impact on their engagement and confidence by ‘owning’ the play through memorising and performance of its poetry.

Poetry, Heritage and Community expanded this pilot project by exploring how poetry could be used to engage young people, visitors and local communities across some of English Heritage’s 400-plus sites, from prehistoric henges, castles, abbeys, stately houses and palaces to industrial heritage sites and cold war bunkers. Poetry, building powerful, affective and creative connections between places and people, has unique potential to deepen and enhance visitor experience and in turn inspire new forms of creative local heritage for current and future generations.

The project’s team was wonderfully interdisciplinary – members of the English Faculty; my Oxford co-I, Dr JC Niala, community poet and Head of Collections at Oxford’s History of Science Museum, the talented team at English Heritage, including Dr Andrew Hann, social historian. The project’s research assistant, Dr Abbi Flint, brought a unique perspective to the work. As a practising published poet and archaeologist, she mined the powerful affinities between archaeology and poetry, including the shared ability to ‘evoke and re-imagine the past and present from fragments’ – what Ben Okri calls ‘an act of reconstruction enabling us to peer beyond death and connect with once-lived lives’.

In line with the aims of the John Fell Fund, the project had a strong research base. It involved archival research and site visits, looking at both historical and contemporary poetry connected to the sites – formal, informal, graffiti, scrapbooks, letters, diaries, poems ‘written’ on glass and carved on stone – to build a composite picture of poetic legacies, receptions, and potential. Abbi created a spreadsheet charting the poetic connections of over fifty selected English Heritage sites, with future potential for site interpretation and visitor engagement, and undertook a research deep dive into Bolsover Castle, Avebury stone circle, and Down House, home of Charles Darwin, three sites chosen for their strong and diverse literary legacies.

All projects take on a life of their own, and for me, this was our unexpectedly powerful collaboration with English Heritage’s ‘Shout out Loud’ Youth Engagement and Learning and Participation teams working closely with Domi Blackmore and Laura Taylor. Their ‘Inspiring Voices’ programme had already started to use poetry to engage young audiences with their sites. Oxford helped amplify and deepen that voice. We jointly delivered eight poetry workshops for young people across Britain at sites ranging from Whitby Abbey, Bolsover Castle, Stonehenge, Down House and Marble Hill House, Twickenham. JC Niala created some fantastic workshop blueprints, harnessing Abbi’s research into the sites’ poetic associations to create new materials – and these were delivered by a team that included Oxford’s Dr Clare Mulley, poet and medievalist, whose energy and creativity proved invaluable. I was blown away by the workshop at Marble Hill House, Twickenham home of Henrietta Howard, Countess of Suffolk, abused wife and mistress to George II (a court role that that gave her comparative independence). I worked alongside Benjamin Turner of Rap Club hosting an initially unruly and bored group of 13-15 year old student visitors. We tried out a poetry workshops on dogs (inspired by Pope’s poem Bounce to Fop, ‘spoken’ by his giant mastiff Bounce), then moved to an afternoon session when Turner encouraged the group to write their own rap performance. After about 90 minutes of intense concentration, they performed a powerful and imaginative piece, the individual lyrics starting with alienation ‘They told me to rap about history, but your history don’t mean nish to me’ and ending with female empowerment, ‘May as well call me Henrietta, I ain’t no King but I do this better’. In June, the video of this performance was played at the Schwarzman’s Past, Present, Future festival and shared by Turner and the English Heritage and Oxford teams at the University of Leeds’ Poetry’s Environments conference.

What next? The research findings will become scholarly articles; the teams will write an interdisciplinary article reflecting on how we engage with each other’s practices and pedagogies; the collaboration between Oxford and English Heritage will grow in new directions which embrace public engagement with heritage and literature. English Heritage would love us to work with them on A Festival of Norman Ideas for September 2027 at Battle Abbey, site of the Battle of Hastings. Please get in touch with me if you are interested!

— Christine Gerrard