I wrote the text for Exeter Cathedral’s welcoming new interpretive scheme and Treasures Gallery, designed by Studio MB, with whom I also worked on Ad Gefrin. It is great to see it all in place now. Here is a taster video.
Despite all my years of familiarity with heritage sites and churches, I still often feel I get things ‘wrong’ when I visit them; stepping where I shouldn’t, misunderstanding a story, entirely forgetting a main character or a date that is precious to this place and time. Such things become obvious once you work or volunteer there, in a way they rarely do to visitors.
This gave me a kinship with the new audiences the cathedral wants to attract. The focus was on local people in Exeter itself, as part of the city’s Vision 2040 for cultural, social and economic development. The team’s goal was to enhance equity through arts and culture, so that the broadest possible audience can experience the cathedral meaningfully for themselves. The cathedral has affected local people’s lives since its foundation in 1050 – so today, whether those people go to church or ever visit heritage sites, how could we make the cathedral tell its stories?
I wanted to know about the craftspeople, the children, the huge majority of day-to-day folk who would have seen the building, who may have worked on constructing or maintaining or running the cathedral, and whose lives would have been impacted by it. Big events are shaped by powerful monarchs and bishops and benefactors, but I wanted to see things from the perspective of Exeter’s people. What stories can we tell to reveal meaningful things about them and their city?
From the outset I knew that church vocabulary was not required to tell important stories. Quire, presbytery, chantry, transept, Dean and chapter, misericord, votive, tracery, apostle, pulpitum, sedilia, misericord, reredos, corbels… we were not going to be teaching people words for the sake of it.
Initial audience development work had also revealed to the team that ‘many of the participants had virtually no historic background knowledge and did not carry a mental ‘timeline’ in order to place periods mentioned such as the Normans’. Luckily we did not intend the interpretation to be a test of prior knowledge, but an enriching and fulfilling experience on visitors’ own terms.
There were some important principles to stick to in planning and writing the text – to seek a good balance of stories about women and men, to tell stories with a global perspective (for example, challenging any colonial ideas) and to seek inclusivity. We can always do better, but those were the principles.
Thanks go to Jonathan Scott, my main contact from the cathedral team, and to Studio MB for their creative approach to this project. When I went to visit the cathedral to look around, the welcome from the front-of-house team was delightful.
