7 minute read
PROJECT PROFILE
PROJECT PROFILE
MARBLE HILL MARVELS
Marble Hill is being revived and at the heart are a new team of volunteers. Rachel Morrison, Audience Development Manager, looks back at all the volunteer team’s achievements so far.
In December 2019 work finally commenced on the 66 acres of Marble Hill Park, within which stands one of the greatest examples of a Palladian Georgian villa. Built as the home of
Henrietta Howard, Countess of Suffolk and mistress to King
George II, Marble Hill House sits on the picturesque Thames riverfront. The site boasts an ice house and a grotto, and has a number of sports facilities, from football pitches to cricket nets.
Marble Hill is not only a historic masterpiece but also a place of abundant nature, and is loved by the whole community as if it were their own garden.
The project The £6 million investment will transform the site and safeguard its history by ensuring that the house is restored and open, for free, for five days a week. The project will also revive the landscape and improve the facilities across the park. A new café will help support the running of the house, and the creation of an additional history-inspired children’s play area will be a wonderful new draw for people.
It has been a delight to start to welcome more volunteers to the team, and their involvement and commitment has breathed new life into the site.
It all started in the kitchen garden Since 2016, Marble Hill has been blessed with a dedicated kitchen garden team who, with the Environment Trust, have created an allotment space. They have nurtured vegetables and inspired children to learn more about sustainability and nature, provided a space for art, and picnics areas for disabled users. During the pandemic our knowledgeable volunteers kept the area watered and it yielded an amazing crop of vegetables for a weekly Marble Hill Veg Shop. This year we hope the produce will provide the best local soup around. ►
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Our fi rst intrepid garden volunteers On a cold day in December our fi rst two intrepid garden volunteers, Joanne and Zoe, came to site. Since that day, Kate Slack (Marble Hill’s Head Gardener) and Jack Morris, our brilliant horticultural apprentice, have created a beautiful tool shed. We have also cleared four woodland quarters of ivy, planted trees, shrubs and 4,000 bulbs, and begun the improvements that will ensure a rich biodiverse area at Marble Hill for years to come. The effort and friendships that have sprung up have been a joy to watch. Many volunteers joined with the wider community on our planting and clearing days as we invited the public to get involved in the project.
The garden volunteers have also been involved in researching the heritage plants that we are putting onto site. Volunteers produce weekly articles which are published in the Twickenham and Richmond Tribune. In the words of volunteer Emma – ‘It has been such a joy to volunteer with the garden team at Marble Hill. I have learned so much and had a lot of fun working alongside so many enthusiastic and knowledgeable people. I am looking forward to returning and seeing the park transform over the coming years.’
Events and admin marvels December also saw the introduction of the event volunteers who have helped with four garden community participation days, our extremely successful Arts in the Park series and, most recently, Community Carols. The team have followed governmental guidelines and adapted the way they work, such as the set-up of the events arena and implementing tracking and tracing of attendees. We have been blessed with people who have turned their hand to volunteer with admin, creation of documents and even the physical delivery of hundreds of newsletters. 4
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Moving meadows July saw the volunteers help create the ‘moving meadows’ project. We worked with the National Trust’s Ham House to reap the meadows, transport the ‘green hay’ over the Thames on the local ferry and then lay it across our wildflower meadow area. Our aim was to diversify the wildflower meadow species and bring attention to the importance of these habitats. Volunteers also helped us give out 400 packets of wildflower meadow seed to help make people more aware of the plight of many meadows, across London in particular, and how we were trying to help ours by working with local partners.
A project that explored more than we thought Nine research volunteers took up the challenge to explore more about wartime Marble Hill and the role that it played in servicing the community, as it does today. From previous research we knew the parkland had been divided up to ensure there were allotments for the local community, and from a Historic England paper we knew about an ‘unidentified structure’ from an aerial shot of the park from the Second World War. Having explored the local records we understood there was a book of 897 names from the community who
FIND OUT MORE To find out more about the project visit www.english-heritage.org.uk/marble-hill-revived 6
Images Previous pages Marble Hill house © Historic England, Skyscan Balloon Photography These pages 1. Diane Mills 2. Graham Mills 3. Tending to the spring bulbs 4. Joanne Song hard at work 5. Henrietta Howard © Historic England 6. Andy Oakley, Kate Slack and Rena Butterwick. had fallen in service that we aimed to remember across armistice with a poppy for each. Intrepid forensic volunteers created a fascinating exhibition exploring the fallen from the area, local memories of those who still remembered the allotments and information about the mystery structure which turned out to be an air-raid shelter that sheltered over 300 people. The volunteers learnt more about the locations that the five bombs fell in and we shared that information with visitors while they explored. In addition, all 897 poppies, one for each of the fallen, were put up by 25 volunteers, creating beautiful artistic sculptures and a visual reminder about the lives that were lost. One volunteer, however, wanted to explore more about these names and has since found that there were far more than those detailed in the memorial book which is the borough’s authority. Roger has since found from further records that in fact there were over 3,000 deaths from our area across the World Wars. Through this work we are helping acknowledge those who have never been remembered or commemorated locally before.
Restoring Henrietta Howard’s orchard Last November volunteers helped us plant the orchard to help restore Henrietta Howard’s former garden. This was a real joy given that the trees, along with thousands of shrubs and plants, were bought just before the first lockdown and kept alive by diligent rangers and the site team. The orchard planting felt a very symbolic and momentous part of the first year of the project and our first year of having volunteers at Marble Hill.
Volunteers at the heart of the project After just a year, despite a global pandemic, we now work with 67 volunteers who regularly bring their diverse gifts to the site, from carving pumpkins for Halloween trails to supporting the ecology of the site. This, however, is just the start of the everincreasing volunteer team as we will need volunteers to welcome people into the house, give tours, work on our extensive education projects, help with the house conservation team and help work with the ecological conservation on site, to name just a few volunteer areas of growth. We look forward to welcoming more people to the team to bring their talents to Marble Hill and enrich its daily life.
We have been delighted to see just how integral the volunteers have become, in such a short time, to the success of the site and how important they now are in the Marble Hill family and, indeed, to Marble Hill’s future. Thank you to all involved. ■
