The Female servants rooms were left as they were when English Heritage moved in but the male servants rooms weren’t. I don’t think that this will make it last for that part of the building because the rooms have been changed or the cookers could catch fire which would bring the house down easily.
The children’s lifestyle wasn’t seen as English Heritage changed the children’s day nursery into an education room. Although we learnt a lot from the different things to look at and learn about for example how the servants used different devices to clean or what an average inventory for a Victorian country house was but it didn’t show an important part of country life. The room had all original wallpaper but nothing else. The room didn’t even show how it would have been laid out but many of the things in there told us about the imperfections such as the insect traps.
The rooms had little white triangles which were there to trap the insects these were discretely placed in the fire places and behind doors but if you looked closely you could see them. Throughout the house there was a strong smell of pheromones. This didn’t really make much of a difference to my understanding of Victorian country life because it just smelt of an old musty house.
The entrance hall carpet was all worn and tatty when English Heritage got the hall. English Heritage had the design re-made so that it matched with the stairs. The carpet design is called the ‘Brodsworth Star’. The carpet would have originally been made out of wool and today the original thing would cost £45000. This is a good example of why it was good to conserve Brodsworth Hall this showed us what the hall would look like if we were there in the 1860’s and gave us a feeling for what the house was like.
Many walls and ceilings were dirty so when English Heritage acquired the hall they cleaned it up only to find that the paints on the ceilings in some rooms were water based do they had to use dry brushing to clean the ceilings. The drawing room has a montage on it showing cherubs and the four seasons. This was a late Georgian fashion but was painted in the Victorian period.
The Gardens
Brodsworth Hall is set in 15 acres of garden and parkland. The gardens were planted in the 3rd quarter of the 19th century and were left with low maintenance after about 1920. There are different parts of the garden such as the flower garden or the grove. The gardens are symmetrical which was the fashion of the time.
The Georgian style of garden was open plains of grass. This was very different from the Victorian fashion which was to have flower gardens. Many games and sports would have been played such as croquet and archery. The gardens had a target house for the archery which was originally thatched but is now roved. The gardens haven’t been changed from what they would have been in the Victorian times so they have helped my understanding of life in a Victorian Country house.
In conclusion I think that English Heritage’s decision to conserve Brodsworth hall was a good decision to make because it is easy to walk around and see different things. Even though we didn’t go into all of the rooms it was interesting to see the room that we did see. I think that my understanding of Victorian life was helped a great deal by seeing Brodsworth Hall but I do think that some of their decisions were bad such as the education centre. I agree that an education centre is a good idea but the life of the children is important. Brodsworth Hall is a good place for tourists to go and visit but Historians wouldn’t be impressed. Some of the rooms had things wrong with them or things in the rooms were historically inaccurate for example record players and TV’s. Brodsworth Hall is definitely a tourists place and probably never will be absolutely accurate to the period. I think that it was a good idea to conserve Brodsworth hall but if they had spent a little more time on it instead of rushing to open the hall to tourists then it could have been better.
