Reflecting on my Experience Heritage module

Before starting the Experience Heritage module, I naturally did a quick online search to make sure I knew what the heritage sector was about. I had a vague idea it was about castles and stately homes, and those mail order DNA tests. Google wasn’t very helpful at all; it just confirmed this fuzzy network of things and added ‘Oxford has heritage’ (I do not live in Oxford). 

Eventually, I found a more coherent definition: ‘England’s heritage sector is a guardian of our nation’s historic environment.’ I thought that sounded important and very noble. But after completing the Experience Heritage module, I am sceptical about this definition. For one, ‘historic environment’ makes it sound like heritage is all already discovered and neatly fenced off into little zones (e.g. Oxford) for you to look at, like when you point out of the window and say ‘ooh, cows!’ Actually, heritage is all around us and interwoven into our daily lives. We don’t always notice it, and a major aspect of the heritage industry is to help people to connect with the past so they can profit from its knowledge and perspectives. This leads to my other point, that the job of the heritage organisations is not entirely to ‘guard’ heritage. Artefacts and knowledge need preserving of course, but they also need sharing. 

All of this (and more) occurred to me while on my placement at the Walks of Life Museum in Tuxford. The museum has a fantastic assortment of handcarts, which volunteers research and restore. Most of the carts and related artefacts were collected by the late Dorothy Harrison, who also founded the site. A lot more than preserving the handcarts takes place, though. When I began thinking about creating my own information display, I also had to consider how visitors would interact with it. I don’t like displays that are just blocks of tiny text, and I was very inspired by how the museum’s displays worked together to create an experience. My favourite was the laundry-cart, which was surrounded by white sheets and other laundry items to visually and spatially recreate the cart’s original context.

When I learned about the museum’s community focus, I decided to incorporate it into my display. The museum doesn’t charge entry fees, which is proven to be the best way for small museums to attract visitors. Instead, it earns money through events like coffee mornings, meaning it has a mutually beneficial relationship with the community around it. I began to think about my display in terms of the community who would see it, and the museum’s surroundings. 

I created a colourful display about sheep, due to the site being home to a little flock (Dorothy Harrison liked sheep a lot). It mainly collates information found on the internet, which isn’t really that groundbreaking in itself. So, I knew my display’s value would be in the way it entertained visitors and fostered a connection between them and the museum, as well as the wider natural environment. Diane, who showed me round the museum, had the wonderful idea of offering up one of the museum’s little sheds for my display. I’d had the idea of a sheep-themed escape room with puzzles that needed solving before visitors could ‘escape,’ but Diane had an even better take. Perhaps the room could be a room you escaped to, rather than from. The disused shed suddenly brimmed with potential as we thought about how a display about sheep could be embedded into a simple and relaxing shepherd hut experience. I had thought of the sheep display as a neutral thing, but I learned that it could be used to evoke feelings, producing a thoughtful and positive museum experience as well as educating visitors.
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I would like to say a massive thank you to the Walks of Life Museum, and to Diane, Neville, Miranda, and of course Dorothy.

Eleanor Rhode's RSC rendition of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ is playful, enchanting, and intensely sympathetic. Writing this blog the day after watching it, with a sleep in between, makes it feel dreamlike – and yet it must have happened, because wasn’t the stage covered in multicoloured ball-pit balls for the latter half of the play, after they descended from the Heavens to fall on Demetrius’s head? And wasn’t there a band playing at times, though I cannot remember even one note they played?

​Evidently, Rhode created a spectacular dreamscape which was simultaneously simple to watch and fiendish to rationalise. I loved it, and I wonder if the fluffy cotton-ball ceiling decorations that changed colour were perhaps derived from the classic Ikea REGOLIT paper lamp. Here are some elements that I did manage to hold onto.

Mathew Baynton as Bottom
Star-power attracts audiences but can also be somewhat distracting within a play if not addressed. Sometimes the star is quickly given a separate entrance to allow for the excitement. So, it was fantastic to have Baynton’s star-power not mediated at all, to convey just how distracting Bottom is when the ‘rude mechanicals’ are trying to rehearse. Baynton’s signature high energy made this portrayal especially sympathetic though, as Bottom motivates his fellow cast who have, after all, made a distinct effort to turn up at this out-of-town Athenian wood and have great concern for how the audience will perceive their play. I was not at all surprised to learn from Wikipedia that Baynton trained in clowning, as many of his movements were strongly reminiscent of Meyerhold’s etudes.

As Melvin Bragg (In Our Time, 2019) notes about the play generally, much of the comedy comes from the contrast between the panicked lovers roaming the wood and Bottom, who immediately accepts his transfiguration and merely asks the fairies for some hay and ear-scratches. Mathew Baynton’s comedic timing with his high-tech ears that pricked up at certain points, and willingness to perplexedly ‘hee-haw’ as if for the first time, rather than as part of a long run of performances, made this production very entertaining.

Physical contact with the fairies
The only physical contact between fairies and humans that a reader would really pick up on is that Titania (Sirine Saba) probably caresses Bottom’s ears, yet Rhode demonstrates many more possibilities in her stage show. There is always debate around a director’s use of textual clues as a basis for physical action, since it goes beyond what is explicitly requested by Shakespeare’s stage directions. Rhode justifies her decisions by their thematic coherency – Oberon (Bally Gill) and Puck (Rosie Sheehy) seem to make contact when they are surprised by the depth of the humans’ suffering in love.

Oberon usually cradles Helena (Boadicea Ricketts) when she is slighted and has no partner to genuinely console her. Puck does not randomly reach out either, being at one point a literal shoulder to cry on for Hermia (Dawn Sievewright). Later, Puck must physically overpower the characters to make them submit to their tiredness. As well as being thematically logical, conveying Puck’s surprise at how the lovers’ problems will not allow them to rest, this sequence creates a helpful contrast. The competitive male Athenians must be comically squashed down and physically restricted by Puck to make them sleep, whereas the much more emotionally tired female characters only need to be gently pulled down into sleep.

Puck’s presence
Another brilliant reading beyond the stage directions is how Rhode uses Puck’s presence. Puck enters scenes for many reasons: gathering intelligence on the lovers and mechanicals, administering love-potion or remedy, leading Demetrius and Lysander away from each other, being summoned by Oberon, or simply soliloquising. When Puck is onstage with the humans, there is generally a part where he speaks either to himself or to Oberon if they are together, and fulfils his purpose for being there, e.g. Telling Oberon “this is the woman, but not this the man”. But before and after this, Puck tends to linger onstage to watch the humans, or to wait to speak to Oberon about what they see.

Since Shakespeare wrote the play to be performed, not read, it makes sense that Puck, or Oberon and Puck save their analysis till the other characters have left. If the fairies and humans spoke at the same time the audience would not be able to hear either, especially in the noisy performance conditions of Shakespeare’s time. As the fairies are invisible to the lovers, it would also not make sense for the humans to keep pausing while the fairies spoke. Furthermore, it gives the fairies a sense of logic and power – they make their play-altering decisions only after watching each stage of the action.

But what should a director do with Oberon and Puck while they are onstage and only watching the lovers? The physical contact has already been covered but it would be distracting for this to happen all the time. Shunting the fairies to the edge of the stage would not make sense either – their presence amid the humans expresses their interest in watching them. The edge of the stage is for marginalised characters (e.g. Hippolyta), and there is no reason why invisible fairies should have to fear the humans disliking their presence. Rhode also has beautifully costumed fairies, with Puck’s blue hair arranged in a long, trailing mullet that seems at once contemporary and yet beyond what any of us would dare attempt. So, Rhode’s fairies would only pull attention away from the humans if they were on the fringes of the stage. That effect is helpful in Hamlet, where the black-clad prince sullenly loiters at the edge of any group he disapproves of, but again there is no reason to relegate the fairies to the edge.

Rhode solves this problem of the lingering Puck by having them often act as a sort of Chorus character. The Chorus was a Greek theatre tradition. A group of Greek citizens would form a Chorus that explained or reacted to the action onstage, giving the audience themselves an onstage representation of themselves to look to. Granted, there are some occasions where Puck’s solemn watching becomes impossible (they are comically squashed against a ladder by the lovers, who in Act 3 Scene 2 move too fast and too illogically for Puck to predict their actions). Then there are other times where Puck playfully abuses his invisibility, copying and satirising passionate gestures made by the lovers, or stealing biscuits from Flute.
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But my main impression of Puck during the lovers’ scenes was as a quiet watcher, often standing completely still. Puck’s thoughts would be secret to us while the humans spoke, but this quiet spectatorship at the proscenium stage’s edges (the ‘platea’, where characters who are closer to the audience’s thinking are usually placed) established Puck as a character who probably shared the audience’s thoughts. I placed especial value on Puck’s closing speeches after each parcel of human action, not because they told me what to think (Puck is a fairy and not the same as me) but because they explained what this meant in Puck’s world and what they would do next.

Notes on the Royal Shakespeare Theatre

I liked the gift shop! My friend and I sat on the boat dock outside the theatre to have our snacks, which is when I found out that you should not feed swans if you are scared of them. I assumed that swans were too cool to do that thing where they all swarm over when they see you feeding one of them. They were not. They all came.

It is easy to see why London, a very populated area even in the 19th century, benefited from a mass sewer system. Before the British civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette created London’s sewer network (opened in 1865), sewage was handled by “a patchwork system of local waste disposal”, meaning waste would be on the streets until collected. Flush toilets were emerging, but only sent waste into local rivers.
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Clearly, it was much better when Bazalgette’s huge sewer network carried waste underground, keeping its smell away from the surface while it travelled via brick sewers to the Thames estuary. When I learned about Bazalgette’s sewer design in school, I thought: ‘Great! The thing that smelled was now travelling somewhere else, where we couldn’t smell it, and it ended up in a suitable place.’

But one fact always puzzled me. Why were some of the sewers egg-shaped? Our textbook stated that this reduced blockages, but how? So, I began investigating and since it was such a tricky concept to actually put into Google (why were some tunnels at this one point in history shaped like eggs… Bazalgette egg-shaped… why does egg shape prevent blockage…), I’ll share my findings.

The crucial point is that the egg-shape is upside down. Bazalgette’s sewers had the narrow point at the bottom. Why bother with this, though? Why not just a circle shape? To answer this, we must have a little look at how sewers work and why Bazalgette needed to prevent blockages.

Bazalgette made his main sewers from bricks and concrete, with a new ‘Portland cement’ that was water-resistant. 1,100 miles of drains below street level fed into the brick sewers, but the 82 miles of brick were larger and had to carry multiple drains’ worth of sewage till they joined up to six “intercepting sewers” that would finish the job and carry the sewage to the Thames. Steam-powered pumping stations were also involved later down the line.

So, three sections of sewage network. It was especially important that the middle section did not get blocked, as it linked the house drains to the largest, sea-bound sewers. The egg shape was a doubly helpful choice for this.

Firstly, it was chosen for strength like the brick material was. An egg shape withstands pressure well, making it a good choice for the middle link of the system, which was carrying large volumes of sewage. The egg shape is a compromise between a pure isosceles triangle (upside-down V shape) which provides the best self-cleansing flow, and a round shape, which is strong and allows for the weight of all the ground pressing down on the sewer.

But the most EXCITING benefit was the preventing of blockages. Upside-down egg shaped sewers always operate at a ‘self-cleansing velocity’, which was important because the brick-lined sewers also carried rainwater but not always the same amount of rainwater. It depended on how much it rained.

Let’s imagine the sewer is round, instead of egg-shaped. Sewage is a mixture of solids and liquid. If it rained lots one day and not much the next day, a round sewer could get blocked. Solid matter might get deposited on the sewer wall and the next day, a lower volume of sewage-rainwater mix would not fill the sewer high enough to wash over the deposited solid matter and unstick it. Over time, this process would cause blockages, and it would be very bad if the middle sewer link got blocked.

With the upside-down egg shape, this does not happen. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, the sewer always fills up in the same way. If there is a tiny amount of rainfall, only the narrowest part of the bottom of the sewer has sewage flow through it. If anything gets stuck, it doesn’t matter how much rainfall happens the next day, it will be enough to unstick the solid deposit, because the sewer will fill up from the bottom again, meaning water will flow past that same section that it did the day before. A blockage would not form as easily, because the sewage is always covering the same parts of the sewer walls, with liquid constantly washing over them and cleansing them.

Secondly, a low volume of sewage is still forced to move hard and fast enough in an upside-down egg shaped sewer to achieve a “self-cleansing velocity” and wash away solid deposits. An upside-down egg shape pressurises the sewage at the bottom. In a circular sewer, a small amount of rainfall would mean a small volume of sewage, which might move too slowly to wash away any debris it leaves behind. With the upside-down egg shape, the sewage at the bottom is forced to move fast enough through the smaller area to wash solids away. If the water is moving at a lower force because there is less of it, the pressure will still be correct (Force = Pressure x Area). By keeping the area value small, the result of dividing force by area will still be a large pressure, large enough to unstick solid debris.

What if a blockage happened at the top, though? Well, if there was enough rainwater to fill the sewer, it would be moving hard and fast enough to achieve a “self-cleansing velocity.” The problem Bazalgette had to fix was blockages at low levels of rainfall, where sewage does not move fast enough to wash away solid deposits.
And he fixed it 🙂

-Happy thinking!
Lauren
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Here’s my Little Bibliography:
The egg; a brief history lesson in civil engineering | PJS Consulting Engineers
Joseph Bazalgette – Wikipedia
How Bazalgette built London’s first super sewer (museumoflondon.org.uk)
sewer word origin – Search (bing.com) (sewiere, in Old French, meant ‘sluice from a pond’)
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