Reading the Room: Books, Access and Community in Heritage Spaces

Reading the Room is a new John Fell funded collaborative project between the National Trust and University of Oxford running from June 2024– May 2025. The project is led by Abigail Williams, Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at the University of Oxford. Tim Pye, National Curator for Libraries at the National Trust and Dr Alice Leonard, an expert in book history in physical spaces at Coventry University are co-investigators. They are supported by postdoctoral research assistant Dr Amy Solomons. 

The National Trust’s collections contain around 300,000 titles in 400,000 volumes spread across over 140 historic houses across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The collections are an invaluable historical source which provide a unique insight into private book ownership and use in Britain and Ireland. The Trust’s historic books constitute a unique resource: in contrast to research libraries across the world, the Trust’s library collections are preserved in the places where they were assembled and read. In those locations they reflect a rich history of social exchange.

Interior of the Library at Springhill, County Londonderry. ©National Trust Images/Annapurna Mellor

In 2023, the research group formed and held a preliminary workshop and series of scoping activities funded through a TORCH Knowledge Exchange Innovation award from the University of Oxford. This explored fundamental questions of the access needs of three distinct groups – Trust visitors, property staff and external academic researchers. We worked with property curators to investigate access challenges, and how to support property teams to understand the significance of their property’s holdings. Surveys were conducted at two National Trust sites with visitors to ask about the types of interpretation and engagement they would be interested in seeing in the future. Finally, academic researchers came together to discuss access needs, models of collaboration with the Trust and the potential the collections hold in interdisciplinary fields across arts and humanities research. Across the three user groups there was an overwhelming enthusiasm to engage more with the Trust to explore wide and inclusive historical questions about the status and space of heritage libraries.  

This one-year project builds upon these research findings to open up a fundamental rethinking of the intellectual, social, and cultural history of historic houses through three National Trust case studies: 575 Wandsworth Road in England, Erddig in Wales, and Springhill in Northern Ireland. 

The project explores what it means to engage with books in a heritage setting, and what forms of mediation or interpretation might better enable contemporary engagement with our histories of books and reading. We hope to show the way in which historic libraries across the globe reflect a more diverse, more outward looking history than is often assumed. Our place-based approach will relocate the history of the book alongside the material and social culture of the time, and in doing so transform what it means to study book history in the twenty-first century.  

Our activities are informed by four main research questions:  

• How do libraries and book collections reflect/expose issues of identity and community in heritage settings and what is the social history of these libraries?  
•  How do libraries and their histories complicate assumptions about historic houses as elite, private, inward-looking spaces?  
•  How does studying books in the context of domestic space alongside other forms of material culture, setting and landscape transform the academic fields of bibliography and the history of the book?  
•  How do we move from a position in which books cannot be accessed to one where properties and curators can respond to the diverse needs of audiences, from visitors to academic researchers? What forms of intervention have been used to enable access elsewhere? 

Across the year, we are engaging with colleagues in the academic and heritage sectors to create a network of interested parties. Each National Trust case study involves an initial fieldwork visit and a follow-up workshop with opportunities for shared learning with staff, volunteers and academics within our network. The project is also sharing its findings with the research community via conferences & seminar talks, and through planned journal articles. The project team have already shared initial findings at ‘The Public Country House: “Treasure of Quiet Beauty” or a Site for Public Histories’ (a V&A and National Trust symposium in May 2024) and are speaking in November 2024 at ‘Early Modern Private Libraries as Sites of Knowledge Production and Circulation’ (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid).  

We are taking an international approach and investigating models of best practice from international public and private institutions such as INTO (International National Trusts Organisation). We are interested in continuing to look globally at these issues during the year as we develop the project to work with additional partners on a larger scale.  

You can follow the project on Instagram and X at @_readingtheroom. To find out more about Reading the Room contact Professor Abigail Williams: abigail.williams@ell.ox.ac.uk or the National Trust Libraries team: libraries@nationaltrust.org.uk.  

The Library at Erddig, Wrexham. ©National Trust Images/John H