Learning

The Wordsworth Trust has been keeping Wordsworth’s memory alive at Dove Cottage since it was founded almost 130 years ago.

During that time, it has acquired many of the other historic buildings that neighbour Dove Cottage, secured the great majority of Wordsworth’s manuscripts, opened the Wordsworth Museum, established an archive, library and fine art collection that celebrate Romanticism and the cultural history of the Lake District, and created the Jerwood Centre, a conservation and research centre, so that these holdings can remain at Dove Cottage, one of the world’s most important literary sites.

The Wordsworth Trust’s purposes are set out in its Memorandum and Articles of Association, and can be summarised as:

1. to provide a living memorial to William Wordsworth and his contemporaries by looking after Dove

Cottage and its environs, and by preserving and developing a permanent collection; and

2. to advance public knowledge and enjoyment of the works of Wordsworth and the literature and culture of the Romantic period (c.1750–1850) through a wide range of public activities.

The Wordsworth Trust’s aims are the same in their intent as these purposes. They provide public benefit through the advancement of education, heritage, culture and the arts, and thereby meet the definition of ‘charitable purposes’ provided by the 2011 Charities Act.

Wordsworth sought through his poetry “to console the afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier, to teach the young and the gracious of every age, to see, to think and feel”. Our activities are inspired by this vision: of a world in which anyone, anywhere can enrich their life through Wordsworth’s ideas and philosophy, regardless of means or background. In undertaking them, we have therefore taken due regard of the Charity Commission’s public benefit guidance. Our activities, and the criteria that we use to measure their success, are reported in detail under the ‘Achievements and Performance’ heading. We use digital technology, publishing and venues in numerous locations to ensure that access is not restricted by geography. While certain activities are aimed at specific beneficiary groups, most are open to anyone. They take place all year round, and some are free of charge.

These pages (15–23) are an extract from our Trustees’ Annual Report for the year ending 31 March 2020. If you would like to see our full statutory annual report and accounts, please contact us or search for the Wordsworth Trust on the Charity Commission’s website. General admissions to Wordsworth Grasmere i

Young people in formal education

(student-days)

Secondary, primary and pre-school Higher education – courses Higher education – other Teacher development opportunities

Total

Participation in events and activities for families

Participation in informal learning activities

Elderly / vulnerable adults Young people (excluding family activities) General audiences

Total

Attendances at talks, poetry readings and other events

(excluding family events)

Interactions via new media

Website (unique page views) Viewings of videos (YouTube, Facebook) Social media followers (31 March 2020)

Total

Research visits (research-days)

Publications

New titles ii

Sales (all titles)

Participants in vocational training iii

Volunteers iv

12 months to 31 Mar 2020

Onsite Offsite 8,270

635 503 33 29

1,200

118

3,677 34

3,711

1,164

4,312 503 33 63

4,911

1,282

85 17

17 119

1,498

829 229

1,075 2,133

684

914 246

1,092 2,252

2,182

197,366 204,684

44,667

446,717

157

2 222

14

24

12 months to 31 Mar 2019

Onsite Offsite 37,748

1,241 451 520 44

2,256

746 6,153 21

6,174

1,816

7,394 451 520 65

8,430

2,562

112 20

34 166

1,803

1,066 177

858 2,101

401

1,178 197

892 2,267

2,204

118,255 94,540

38,753

251,548

177

1 4,115

12

22

i Includes screenings of a pre-recorded tour of Dove Cottage between April and August 2019. ii Excludes Vital Stream, a joint publication with Carcanet Press. iii Excludes work experience placements. iv People who did volunteer work on a regular basis and / or for sustained periods of time.

1. Overview of progress against strategy

2019/20 has been dominated by Reimagining Wordsworth, our major strategy for affirming Wordsworth’s continuing relevance in the 21st century. Grasmere residents, students in Cumbria, schoolchildren from Mexico, and refugees from countries in Africa and Asia were amongst the many people from a diverse range of backgrounds whose lives we enhanced with new activities launched in the year. These activities are now complementing our existing programmes for people of all ages, from families discovering poetry together to people with disabilities who find in Wordsworth’s words a means of expressing their own experiences.

Meanwhile, the transformation of our site is well underway. Dove Cottage has undergone its first major restoration since the 1970s: roof slates and floorboards have been individually inspected; repairs have been carried out; new heating, lighting and security systems have been installed, and the exterior has been rerendered. The inside has been ‘dressed’ with original and replica objects of the period, many of them made or sourced by volunteers on our behalf, and a film has been created to give visitors the essential introduction that the Dove Cottage experience has always lacked. We finished the year ready to reopen the Cottage as a step back in time, a place to imagine world-changing poetry being written in this humble dwelling.

We also finished the year with a new Learning Space for use by the schools, universities and community groups who come here for both reflection and inspiration, a new Café, and a new brand, ‘Wordsworth Grasmere’, to promote our improved visitor offer. The new Museum took shape throughout the year, as the builders dug downwards into the bedrock and built upwards towards the new rooftop viewing station. The Museum will display Wordsworth’s own handwritten words, in the place where they were largely written, enabling visitors to discover how his poetry and ideas still resonate today. Its opening in 2020/21 will mark the completion of Reimagining Wordsworth.

In early March we launched a year of international celebrations of the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth’s birth, with a wreath-laying ceremony at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. In the same month we were preparing to reopen Dove Cottage on 7 April 2020, Wordsworth’s actual birthday, our inclusion in National Geographic’s global ‘Cool List’ of destinations hinting at the worldwide interest that this anniversary would bring. However, by the end of the year, Covid-19 was changing things utterly. While museums across the UK were closing their doors, we delayed reopening ours. Reimagining Wordsworth is a £6.2 million project and it has been ten years in the planning: by 7 April it was clear that we would be completing it in a reimagined world.

2. Public benefit a) Measuring our performance

We monitor our activities by beneficiary group, as shown in the table on page 13. As well as the statistical measures shown here, we talk to our beneficiaries and invite their feedback to ensure that we are meeting their needs and aspirations.

b) Wordsworth Grasmere

At 8,270, our visitor numbers were lower than they would be in a normal year, and they reflect the transitional nature of 2019/20, the construction phase of Reimagining Wordsworth taking place over the full twelve months. Nevertheless, we were able to offer visitors a ‘Discover Wordsworth’ virtual experience in the Jerwood Centre at the start of the year, and ‘Dove Cottage Uncovered’ tours while the Cottage was between its conservation and fit-out.

While the builders worked on Dove Cottage, the Museum, the Learning Space and the Café, volunteers helped us to prepare the two new green spaces that will also form part of the Wordsworth Grasmere experience: the Sensory Garden and the Woodland. We recruited a Head of Visitor Experience and a Volunteer Coordinator – both new staff posts – to help ensure that Wordsworth Grasmere fulfils its potential to inspire our future visitors.

c) Formal education

Our former learning room served as a temporary shop and ticket point while the new Learning Space was being created. This, the rest of the building works onsite, and the involvement of our education team in planning and opening the new Learning Space inevitably reduced our capacity, so we were pleased to reach nearly 5,000 young people in formal education this year.

Highlights in the year included completing a multiyear project (on the theme of Wordsworth, Turner and the weather) involving schools in west Cumbria whose catchments have high levels of deprivation and described by one teacher as “a huge success!”. We also provided free ‘Daffodils’ days for nurseries and reception classes, and new ‘Words in the Woods’ activities, our Education Officer having gained a Forest School qualification ready for when the new Woodland becomes available for use by schools. We worked with a school in Barrow-in-Furness during Shakespeare Week, in collaboration with Lakeland Arts, and schools across Cumbria on a music composition project inspired by the Duddon Sonnets, in collaboration with Manchester Camerata, Cumbria Music Hub and Orchestras Live. Our Trainees continued to maintain a weekly reading group for Grasmere Primary School, and new writing workshops for six primary schools in Kendal resulted in the poetry pamphlet My Place, one of two new publications in the year.

We were pleased to see a slight increase in attendances at courses for higher education students despite the Reading Room, where they are based, also being the venue for our ‘Discover Wordsworth’ virtual tours. We also continued to provide training opportunities for teachers, some of them provided as part of the Reimagining Wordsworth project.

d) Families and young people

We continued to put on crafts sessions and other creative activities for families, including our everpopular ‘Rucksack of Rhymes’, in settings around the county.

This year, venues included Theatre by the Lake in Keswick, the Lake District National Park’s visitor centre, and public libraries in 14 towns across Cumbria. Onsite activities included an eco-art workshop and family yoga, both of which proved the value of our new Learning Space. The total number of activities is fewer than last year, for the same reasons as we have given above.

Our education team also helped with the production of The Wordsworths, a new children’s book, to be published later in July 2020 by Franklin Watts.

e) Informal learning

Participation in informal learning was in line with last year’s high total, and as always, there is a great diversity of activity behind the statistics. Some programmes are well established, such as the reading / writing groups that take place in cafés and other relaxed settings from the Solway Coast to South Lakeland, often supported by professional poets and artists. Other programmes are new, such as a residential weekend for refugees from various parts of the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. The weekend was organised with the Glenthorne Quaker Centre, which uses ‘human goodwill’ to support asylum-seekers at risk of social isolation, and it formed part of the Reimagining Wordsworth project. We hope to repeat it in 2020/21.

The education, healthcare, heritage and community workers who were brought together by our ‘Skills Sharing’ project in 2018 met again in August to share experiences of using Wordsworth’s poetry to carry out their own life-enhancing work. The impact of this new initiative is now being felt from hospices in west Cumbria to schools on the US–Mexico border. We also maintained our support for the Dove Cottage Young Poets in Kendal, led this year by Cumbrian poets Katie Hale and Kim Moore, and developed a partnership with Triple A Project in Penrith, to work with young adults with autism. Our writing workshops in HMP Haverigg, organised with Her Majesty’s Prison Service, continued for a second year, and led to an exhibition of drawings based on the themes of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’.

Much of the work that we describe under this heading is tailored to the needs of people whose age, health or other circumstances make them vulnerable. By the end of the year our Community Outreach Officer was keeping in touch with many of these groups via digital means, so that we could give them as much support as possible during the lockdown.

f) Events

‘Reimagining Wordsworth on tour’, a series of pop-up poetry events in 15 Cumbrian towns and villages from April to August, was a concerted effort to present our programme at its normal level despite the building work onsite, and we are pleased to report similar overall attendance figures to last year.

Literature classes on The Prelude continued for a fourth year; other regular activities included guided walks around Hawkshead and Ullswater, organised in partnership with the Lake District National Park Authority, introductions to poetry led by local poet Polly Atkin, and practical workshops on subjects from calligraphy to knitting.

Contemporary poetry was a central theme: we held readings by Nick Makoha and Anna Selby, our two poets in residence during the year, hosted the winners of the Poetry Business International Book and Pamphlet Competition, staged a National Poetry Day party in October, and joined in with the nationwide Places of Poetry project in the summer. We also continued to promote open meetings of the Grasmere History Group and the Dove Cottage Poets. Our most popular events were the annual Wordsworth Lecture in London, given this year by Lucy Newlyn (whose sonnet sequence Vital Stream we were delighted to publish jointly with Carcanet Press), ‘What is Natural?’ in June, run in collaboration with Principia College in Illinois and including a moonlit walk in the Wordsworths’ footsteps, and Simon Armitage’s annual summer reading – his first in Grasmere since he was appointed Poet Laureate.

g) Digital engagement

Our online presence continued to grow as we added new videos to our YouTube channel, including ‘Tuesday Treasures’, a weekly look at items in the collection, and new blog posts by specialists in a range of subjects. As part of the Reimagining Wordsworth project, we also launched iWordsworth, which is now available online for anyone to add their own research into places that have Wordsworthian associations or that simply inspire Wordsworthian thoughts.