Across the UK there are over seventy museums in writers’ homes and birthplaces open to the public. They include museums dedicated to globally renowned household names such as Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen and Burns, as well as to underappreciated national treasures such as Laurence Sterne, Elizabeth Gaskell and Horace Walpole. In March 2020 there was widespread concern about the future of these museums, before the announcement of the Culture Recovery Fund. Twitter pleas and donation pages emerged, many raising lifesaving sums of money for individual properties. The teams working at these properties mobilised to furlough staff and then were left to consider how to continue to meet their aims through lockdown. All were profoundly impacted by COVID-19, in ways unique to the literary heritage sector. This chapter describes the efforts of heritage practitioners from the UK’s literary house sector in responding to the coronavirus pandemic and in finding new ways for the public to access English literature at a time when it was never more in demand.

The coronavirus pandemic has brought a range of challenges to UK literary heritage sites that other museums or stately homes will not have had to face. Since writers’ homes are seldom much bigger than other houses, social distancing is harder than in most museums. Moreover, the visitor experience in writer’s house museums, typically aiming to engage visitors with literature and to bring texts to life, was severely impacted in many ways. Writers’ homes are often interpreted primarily through live guided tours, which were impossible while restrictions on gatherings of people remained in place. In some cases, moreover, the use of touch-screen technology or object-handling as a vehicle for engaging visitors with an author’s writings is more extensive than at conventional museums. These factors often necessitated urgent, large-scale reinterpretation. Furthermore, many literary heritage sites were disproportionately hit by the downturn in international tourism, because some writers with museums dedicated to them (ranging from Shakespeare to Rudyard Kipling) are of as much interest to a global readership as to the local community. Even when reopening began, many of these museums also lost out because coach trips, which account for a substantial proportion of their visitors, were not permitted.

At the same time, because these museums are valued for their connections to literature, they have had some advantages over other museums, since they are not solely dependent on their collections or on the historical value of the site. There is evidence to suggest that literary tourists are less likely to be ‘incidental visitors’ – i.e. passing trade – and that the sector has a more dedicated and engaged base of supporters than other heritage sites or stately homes (Frost and Laing, 2012). In order to stay connected with them, some literary heritage sites, like Chawton House, home of the brother of Jane Austen, Edward Knight, have attempted to channel resources into online festivals to appeal to virtual literary tourists and make their work accessible to those unable to attend their events in person. Other literary heritage sites attempted to keep the public engaged through online book clubs, poetry readings and creative writing initiatives. On the whole, the sector was well placed to capitalise on the rediscovery of the pleasures of reading literature that characterised lockdown for many people.

All told, then, there was every indication that the coronavirus pandemic had impacted the UK’s literary heritage sector in unique ways, forcing it to change how it operates by posing particularly intractable challenges and difficulties on the one hand, while presenting opportunities to engage with the public on the other. Given this, we undertook an ambitious study to evaluate both the damage done by the pandemic and the lessons that could be learned from it in order to enhance the future resilience of this sector, which includes so many places of unique importance to our literature, heritage and culture.

Data were gathered from literary heritage sites from across the country, including all four nations of the UK and most of the regions of England. The sample included some of our best-known and most-visited literary heritage sites alongside some of our least and featured some of the most recently opened sites as well as some of the longest established. The qualitative data presented herein were gathered by interviews held with the directors/curators/managers of sixteen organisations (principally writer’s house museums but not exclusively) carried out between August and December 2021.¹ Quantitative data pertaining to visitor numbers, website traffic, finances and staffing levels were gathered by a questionnaire completed by eleven organisations. These organisations were paid for their input.²

Understandably, very little previous research has so far been dedicated to the impact of the pandemic on the literary heritage sector. Emma Treleaven’s reflective account of curating Charles Dickens’s House during lockdown is an exception. Her essay repeats accounts made by curators of Hill Top, Ted Hughes’s House and Dove Cottage, who remarked on lower visitor numbers changing the atmosphere of the place:

But most reports and scholarship have indicated the shortcomings rather than the successes of the sector, warning of problems emerging in the future if new ways of working do not rise from the ashes of the pandemic. Criticising initial pandemic responses as ‘medical’ and ‘retrofitted’, comprising social distancing, hand sanitisation and the removal of tactile exhibits and activities, John David Bull has drawn from Transformational Education Theory to suggest that the pandemic crisis for the museum sector is also potentially ‘a chance to embrace a role as an enabler of individual and societal change’ (2020). Our research suggests that many writer’s house museums have recognised and embraced this opportunity in their responses to the pandemic. Nevertheless, the challenges they face are considerable. As the Network of European Museum Organisations (NEMO) has shown:

This chapter contributes to recent innovations in literary tourism research which seek to put theory into practice, especially the case studies undertaken by Ian Jenkins and Katrin Anna Lund (Literary Tourism, 2019). Jenkins and Lund’s practice-led approach in turn builds upon the interdisciplinary work of scholars of literature (Watson, 2006), art history (Harney, 2013), tourism (Laing and Frost, 2012), and business, sociology and cultural heritage (Robinson and Andersen, 2002). While this body of scholarship sheds light on the motivations of literary tourists and the appeal of the writer’s museum, and the case studies share the practice of heritage professionals embracing the digital turn, scholars have yet to consider the continued appeal and the digital or distanced workings of literary house museums during periods of enforced closure or reduced capacity.

The digital turn certainly threw a lifeline to arts, culture and heritage organisations during the pandemic. Yet for writer’s house museums, it also poses some interesting and challenging questions. Virtual tours, in particular, made it possible for visitors to see these museums without visiting them in person, which in turn meant the museums could engage with people from around the world, including many who would never have had the chance to experience them otherwise.

In some cases, the virtual tour was a standout innovation pointing towards new ways of working in the future beyond the pandemic. The virtual tour of Jane Austen’s house was listed by Forbes magazine as one of the best virtual tours in the world, competing successfully with content curated by the likes of Google and Amazon (‘Bucket list travel …’ Bloom, 2021). Bespoke, intimate tours were offered to clients ranging from the British embassy in Paraguay to the PBS broadcasting service in the USA. In a ten-month period 32,000 users logged on to a tour, which is roughly comparable in scale to the 40,000 tourists who would visit the house in the average year (Interview 4, Lizzie Dunford, Jane Austen’s House, 12 August 2021). Going forward into the post-pandemic future, a hybrid model could make it possible for literary heritage museums to stream live tours into classrooms in (say) Japan or the United States, outside of normal opening hours, thereby expanding the reach of these museums dramatically.

At the same time, however, the rise of the virtual tour could pose some difficult questions to the literary heritage sector. By definition, writers’ houses differ from most other galleries and museums in their dependence on site specificity. As Nicola Watson has put it, a writer’s house museum presents itself as ‘the scene that remembers the act of writing’ (Watson, 2020), which in turn frequently involves a process of ‘site sacralization’ (term from MacCannell’s ‘The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class’, 1976). Might virtual tours, by rendering an in-person visit to the site unnecessary, thereby risk undermining the very raison d’être of literary heritage sites?

Perhaps one way of countering any such threat might be to offer in-person visitors an experience that is more immersive, more tactile and more multisensory than any virtual tour could offer. Thus, a counterpart to the digital turn emerged in the form of the sector’s marked embrace of outdoor spaces such as gardens, grounds and landscapes.

Reading and the outdoors

The initial lockdown imposed in March 2020 meant that many more people than ever before were working from home. When staff were able to be furloughed, suddenly a huge percentage of the working population found themselves being paid not to work. Lockdowns and furloughs brought many widely reported changes in our behavioural patterns. One of these was a reconnection with the importance of nature and the outdoors, brought about by stringent coronavirus related restrictions, which curtailed the amount of time we could spend outside. Another was an upsurge in the public’s appetite for reading – especially for reading longer, more demanding literature – which was widely discussed in the press (Boucher et al., 2020; Charlton, 2022; Hunt, 2020; Wood, 2020). Seemingly, these two trends were unrelated, since reading is often considered an indoor pursuit. However, UK literary heritage sites repeatedly found creative and innovative ways to connect them, with a view to mutually enhancing the benefits of both for health and wellbeing.

According to book sales experts Nielsen, 202 million paperbacks and hardbacks were sold in the UK in 2020, the first time sales had exceeded 200 million since 2012 (‘Booksellers hope …’, Bloom, 2021). In the UK and Ireland 2021 went on to be a record-breaking year for book sales (Davies, 2022). One survey showed that 31 per cent of respondents were reading more since the lockdown began, rising to almost one in two 18–24-year-olds (45 per cent) (Reading Agency, 2020). The nation also increased the amount of time it spent reading books from around 3.5 hours per week, to 6 (sample of 1,000 adults, surveyed from 29 April to 1 May) (Flood, 2020). The Scottish Book Trust surveyed readers weekly between March and August 2020, finding that daily poetry reading doubled from 3 per cent to 6 per cent and daily fiction reading rose from 55 per cent to 72 per cent over that period. Moreover, they found that of all the genres readers turned to during the pandemic, the ‘classics’ experienced by far the largest uptake, accounting for 37 per cent of reading before lockdown and 58 per cent five weeks later. As a study from Aston University showed, ‘Many found the lockdown to be a great opportunity to explore things they didn’t normally have the time or desire to read (like hefty classics that seemed too dull or heavy to bring on a commute)’ (Boucher et al., 2020). Some turned to reading for escapism, and some took comfort in old books or in more predictable genres. Shared reading and remote reading emerged as popular activities (Scottish Book Trust, 2020). Having more time certainly helped.

Outdoor interpretation

Literary houses differ from their competitors in the historic house sector in generally being of a smaller capacity. Places like Beatrix Potter’s Hill Top, a Lake District Cottage, and Laurence Sterne’s Shandy Hall, a medieval parsonage, did not have the space to accommodate the social distancing measures brought in by the government in order to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus. More than ever, because of the drive to find well-ventilated spaces, and because of the way in which outdoor exercise had been permitted in some capacity throughout lockdown, more and more visitors looked to find local outdoor spaces for their leisure time. As the curators of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust told us, ‘people wanted outdoors’:

This was a struggle for many literary houses, some of which had not yet made much use of the grounds in which their properties sit. Many literary heritage sites reported that public demand for outdoor space soared during lockdown: forced to ‘stay local’, many people discovered nearby outdoor spaces, often for the first time. Thus, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s Anne Hathaway’s farm, the garden of Beatrix Potter’s Hill Top, the extensive grounds of Gilbert White’s House and Walter Scott’s Abbotsford, and the gardens of Laurence Sterne’s Shandy Hall and Jane Austen’s House all reported unusually high visitor numbers during the pandemic, and in the case of Abbotsford, reaching record-breaking levels. This transformed the ways they make use of their gardens and grounds.

Walter Scott’s extensive Abbotsford Estate saw an increase in visitor traffic of 400 per cent across the same period between 2020 and 2019. Londoners looking for green places to walk found Strawberry Hill for the first time: ‘Strawberry Hill grounds was a little bit of a haven in among all the madness and it was hugely valued by the local community’ (Interview 3, Derek Purnell, Strawberry Hill House and Garden, 9 August 2021). The Chelsea Flower Show garden that the Gilbert White team developed in collaboration with a local college, scheduled for May 2020, which did not then take place until August 2021, acquired new significance. Despite having been scheduled to celebrate White’s birthday, the continuing lockdowns prolonged its lifespan, thereby allowing the organisation to continue commemorating the tercentenary well beyond the date itself (Interview 15, Kimberley James, Gilbert White’s House, 7 October 2021).

Many literary heritage site managers saw outdoor space in a different way due to the coronavirus pandemic, generating new interpretation for the outdoors for the first time. The team at Strawberry Hill emphasised much more than usual the fact that they have a garden and ran garden tours: ‘it was perceived to be COVID secure in a good way’ (Interview 3, Purnell, 2021). The staff of National Trust property Hill Top saw that ‘people still wanted to come and visit the gardens’, even when the property itself was closed. Perceiving this as ‘a real opportunity to think about the outside offer’, the garden was interpreted for the first time, with new, temporary, labels, which the following year were professionally printed and which will now continue to be used (Interview 10, Alice Sage, Hill Top, 13 October 2021). They opened a new café in the paddock to cater for their new audience and to help prolong their stay and improve visitor experience. Given that the appeal of Potter’s works lies in their depictions of local wildlife, this was a logical step, yet one that, perhaps surprisingly, had not been taken before. Strawberry Hill made similar interventions in their grounds, putting up signage to inform visitors of wildlife that had recently been spotted and of the reasons behind certain plantings, tying the history of the garden to the narrative of the house which centres on Horace Walpole’s time at the property, spreading the word about his garden design and changing views of the estate: ‘in a way, I think it’s made us appreciate that aspect of the house in a way that we probably wouldn’t have done’ (Interview 3, Purnell, 2021).

Seamus Heaney HomePlace, which had to close its 200-seater theatre space as well as its exhibition space during lockdown, took perhaps the biggest step in moving interpretation outdoors. Mid Ulster District Council opened an outdoor part of the visitor experience called Seamus Heaney Open Ground, developing five new sites about which Heaney specifically wrote poems, providing interpretation and a smartphone application as a guide (Interview 2, Brian McCormick, Seamus Heaney HomePlace, 9 August 2021). The app links the landscape of the area with Heaney’s life and poetry, mapping the five locations that richly influenced his work. For each venue the app provides a pertinent poem, an audio file of the poem, a description of its significance, as well as a ‘Go Back in Time’ feature, which uses virtual reality to reimagine the place as it might have been at the time of writing, with Heaney’s words magically resting in the air around it. The app includes urban and rural locations, from the Strand at Lough Beg to the Bus Station at Magherafelt.

There is some evidence to suggest, however, that the sector’s turn toward nature and the outdoors might not exactly have been in reaction to the pandemic, since some initiatives of this kind predate the outbreak. For example, Ted Hughes’s birthplace lacks any outdoor space, so its trustees commissioned a cartographer to produce beautifully hand-drawn maps of walks through the landscapes that inspired him, for free distribution. The research and planning for this had begun some two years earlier, and though its launch was delayed by the pandemic, the public’s newfound appetite for the outdoors was of benefit to the project’s popularity (Interview 5, Stephen Gould, Elmet Trust, 17 August 2021). Similarly, it transpires that the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust had begun conversations about making better use of their outdoors spaces, such as Anne Hathaway’s farm and the garden at Hall’s Croft, before the pandemic began. It is possible, then, that the pandemic had an accelerating effect rather than a causal one in regard to these developments.³

Wellbeing

The move to outdoor space was one that prompted some predicted and some unexpected benefits for wellbeing. The People and Nature Survey for England from April to June 2020 found that 85 per cent of respondents reported that being in nature made them happy (Natural England, 2020). The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ (RSPB) Recovering Nature report revealed that 77 per cent of those surveyed believed that visiting nature during the pandemic had been important for their general health and happiness (RSPB, 2020). Surrey’s Gardens and Wellbeing Report also found that more frequent garden visits were associated with better wellbeing during lockdown (White, 2021).⁴ The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that evidence from the coronavirus pandemic corroborates the relationship between time spent in nature and general wellbeing: ‘The mental health and well-being benefits of time spent in nature were all the more important when people were confined to their homes’ (2021).

Lockdown made people want to engage with nature more. The National Trust survey suggested that most people (55 per cent) planned to spend as much time in nature as possible when restriction are lifted, with a third of respondents reporting increased interest in nature (National Trust, 2020). But there was also a social imperative to improving access to nature. Between March and May 2020, one in ten people either had no access to a garden, or found it difficult to access one, with ethnic minorities and those with a low household income more likely to find access difficult. Those under 47 years of age also struggled more than their older counterparts (White et al., 2021).⁵

The Laurence Sterne Trust at Shandy Hall re-opened its garden with its longstanding second-hand bookshop, which also sells antiques and souvenirs. They had over a thousand paying visitors: ‘they came and they came back again, as well’ (Interview 8, Patrick Wildgust, the Laurence Sterne Trust, 29 September 2021). This garden-visiting audience was a genuinely new one, coming from across Yorkshire, alerted to the Hall’s beautiful grounds by the Gardener’s World magazine, which provides its subscribers with two for one entry to select gardens across the UK. An increased interest in gardening, and subscriptions to Gardener’s World magazine during lockdown had also dramatically increased.⁶ In this way, Shandy Hall Gardens were part of a major shift in reading, gardening and walking which brought widespread benefits to literary house visitors. Strawberry Hill began a gardening group for vulnerable adults. As their curator told us, ‘I think it made us perhaps as an organisation more aware of that and, hopefully, a little bit more empathetic in terms of the importance with which Strawberry House is part of their wellbeing’ (Interview 3, Purnell, 2021). For the house, this has improved their local reputational profile, hopefully leading to repeat visits by the local community.

Those literary heritage sites that are predominantly outdoor spaces, such as the site of St Bede, Jarrow Hall, had their own challenges. Staff had to be retrained to be able to multitask and do farm work, look after animals, as well as perform basic environmental checks on the collections.

But literary houses also provided an important lifeline during lockdown in connecting people with beautiful places and with classic narratives. As Ellie King and colleagues have shown, ‘Despite the immediate loss of up to 80 per cent of income (NEMO, 2020) and the fear of more long-term economic disruption, museums and galleries nevertheless saw themselves as community leaders, bringing people together’ (King, 2021). In the case of literary house museums, they were able to do so through the turn to reading. As Jeff Cowton, curator of Wordsworth Grasmere’s Dove Cottage, told us,

Cowton took the approach of sending updates about Dove Cottage with his audience, recording a video of an afternoon tea with some ginger snaps made from the Wordsworth family recipes and tweeting a photograph of Dove Cottage garden with its hawthorn in blossom. While Wordsworth Grasmere saw 55 per cent fewer visitors in the 12 months to 31 March 2021 than in the previous year (3,732 compared to 8,270), it saw an increase of 72 per cent in views of online videos (160,912 compared to 93,317), largely down to their creation of eleven new videos for families with young children to watch at home during lockdown (Wordsworth Grasmere, 2021). The team put it down to a general sense that the house represented a kind of stability and hope. The house, and the garden, integral to the narrative of the Wordsworths and the Lakes, was still there in this time of trouble. As Cowton reflected, ‘And so maybe literary heritage, you know, in our particular circumstance, anyway, offered that timelessness’ (Interview 1, Cowton, 2021).

Outdoor education

The literary house sector tends perhaps more than any other to make the most of major anniversaries, to help encourage repeat visits. One of the major events in the calendar for the Burns Birthplace is the annual Burns Night Supper. During lockdown, they had the supper outside in a marquee. Having acquired the marquee, they were then able to also provide a week of events for families. Crafts, bug hunts and a Scots language animal trail through the woodland brought families to the grounds to enjoy the good weather. Parents in particular were pleased, having spent months at home home-schooling.

When archaeologists at the nearby universities found themselves unable to do fieldwork, Jarrow Hall opened its doors to them. This led to their being able to deliver two weeks of summer school outdoors. Curators of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust found that placing performers outdoors made them rethink their indoor offer:

More than ever, literary heritage professionals are having to gather the results of the pandemic, its hits and misses, in order to engineer new ways of moving forward for the sector.

Conclusion

Curators found new ways to revitalise and repurpose their engagement with the outdoors, bringing literature into nature in new ways for a public rediscovering the importance of both. These were often highly innovative: sometimes site-specific, sometimes interactive. Many were completely new departures: perhaps surprisingly, Hill Top brought Beatrix Potter’s words into her own garden for the very first time. Interestingly, even writers’ houses without gardens sought to connect their publics with the outdoors. If, as Elaine Heumann Gurian points out, ‘museums are to be useful as they emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic era, they must be fundamentally rethought because the social, political, economic, and health environments they will re-enter are profoundly unlike the world they left’ (Gurian, 2022).

In light of this, it is noteworthy that one of the common threads identifiable in these developments is a tendency to emphasise the importance of involving the local community.⁷ This is a significant development for a sector that, as previous researchers have found, was traditionally reliant on tourists who, in many cases, would travel long distances for the specific purpose of visiting a particular writer’s house (Laing and Frost, 2012). The coronavirus pandemic obliged these museums to rethink their dependence on the traditional ‘pilgrimage’-type visitor and to engage the public in their local communities in new ways. This may account for the success of the turn to the outdoors we have identified here, since those who live nearby are more likely to share a sense of identification with a writer’s sense of place, space and landscape. Going forward, such developments may prove to enhance the longer-term resilience of the sector: partly by tackling, through local public engagement, the perceptions of elitism that sometimes surround literary heritage; and partly by preparing for a more sustainable future, in reducing the sector’s dependence on long-distance travel.

All of the museums studied here have helped visitors reconceive how literature fits into our lives. Far from being a sedentary activity, reading is shown to be compatible with exercise and can involve the outdoors as much as the indoors. We have long known that nature and exercise have positive impacts on health and wellbeing, and that reading literature do too, but lockdowns led many writer’s house museums to seek out innovative ways of combining the benefits of both, indicating a positive direction for the literary heritage sector to take in the process of moving on from the pandemic.

Literary house museums, usually determined as such because of the significance of their indoor space, began en masse to project their collections and their treasures beyond the premises, mapping themselves onto the wider literary landscape of the UK and merging cultural and natural worlds in their pandemic programming. Hence, the coronavirus pandemic has taught the literary heritage sector that its next step probably lies outside the walls of the museum. For one unnamed, senior curator we interviewed, the pandemic’s most important lesson was that ‘it’s OK [for the museum] to be closed’. In exploring the efforts of the literary house sector to cross the divide between culture and nature, this chapter has shown that engaging with a public that is increasingly environmentally aware, health conscious and wellbeing orientated is the most promising way of turning ‘lockdown reading’ into the ‘new normal’.

Key insights

• For many literary heritage sites, the coronavirus pandemic transformed the ways they make use of their gardens and grounds. Some properties reported record-breaking numbers of outdoor visitors.
• Curators found new ways to revitalise and repurpose their engagement with the outdoors, bringing literature into nature in new ways for a public rediscovering the importance of both. These were often highly innovative: sometimes site-specific, sometimes interactive.
• Literary heritage initiatives during the various lockdowns helped to reconceive how literature fits into our lives. Far from being a sedentary activity, the sites we interviewed helped to demonstrate how reading can be compatible with exercise and can involve the outdoors as much as the indoors.
• The coronavirus pandemic taught the literary heritage sector that its next step probably lies outside the walls of the museum, and that engaging with a public that is environmentally aware, health conscious and wellbeing orientated is perhaps the most promising way of turning ‘lockdown reading’ into the ‘new normal’.