High Cross Hill: a love letter

“I’m Oliver. I’m six and a half. And I like the chairs.”collected on the Message Phone

High Cross Hilla love letter

High Cross Hilla love letterRichard Povall

Copyright © 2013 Richard Povall (text and images*)

All rights reserved. Permission granted to reproduce for personal and educational use only. Commercial copying, hiring, lending is prohibited.The right of Richard Povall to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Cold Ridge Press, Devon (www.coldridgepress.com)Visit www.richardpovall.net/teatime for more information on the art piece.

ISBN-13: 978-0-9566114-3-7ISBN-13: 978-0-9566114-4-4 (ebook)

Printed in the United Kingfom

First Edition: September 2013 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

*apart from plan of House on page 38

Foreword

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This book is primarily the record of an artist residency at a National Trust property in the heart of the English countryside. High Cross House (originally High Cross Hill) was built on the Dartington Hall Estate in the early 1930s as an exemplar of the International Style (which we

now refer to as Bauhaus). It was built as a home for the renowned educationist William Burnlee Curry who came to Dartington as Headmaster at the behest of its modern founders, Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst to begin in earnest an experimental school based on the principles of freedom and self-determination.

The record became a love story.

It is about love for a house: High Cross House has marvellous bones and houses marvellous ghosts. It is a house that seems to have lost its way and its meaning since losing the ability to fulfil its original purpose (Dartington Hall School closed in 1987).

It is about love for freedom. That children should be free to determine their own destinies; that children should make their own decisions (however flawed); that children can choose their educational path and shape their own lives, given the right support and gentle guidance. These ideas may seem hopelessly utopian, and yet almost a century on, they form the basis of child-centred learning that now sits within the backbone of modern education.

It is about love for an idea. The modern Dartington was established in rural England with American money to embody an Indian philosophy, at a time when the world was recovering from the devastation of the war to end all wars. In a time of unprecedented economic and social upheaval. Dartington was established not as a New Utopia but as an experiment in rural living based on a determination to create rich, cultured, examined lives within a sustainable economy based on meaningful work and play. It brought to England many of the industrial farming techniques that we now decry but which were seen (with some justification) as the salvation to a deeply wounded rural and agricultural economy. As flawed as the implementation of these ideas may have been in hindsight, what lies behind them has much to say to us still about how to live ‘an abundant life’.

Richard Povall, September 2013. High Cross House

June 18Residency starts tomorrow

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I’m starting my artist residency at High Cross House tomorrow, and I’m feeling curiously apprehensive about it. I can’t quite put my finger on why, but suspect it’s to do with working in a public space which is something I’m not used to doing. As someone whose practice involves

spending long hours at a computer often in intense concentration trying to find a tiny error in some code somewhere, the thought of doing this in a space where I’m simultaneously being encouraged to interact with visitors to the House feels a bit daunting. People visiting the House are however intrinsic to the project, so this is something I’ll have to find a balance with.

I love this house. It’s at once homely and grand. Not grand in a National Trust stately home kind of grand, but grand when compared to the other modernist houses that were built at the same time on the Dartington Estate. They remind us perhaps that despite the egalitarian and utopian ideals of the couple who were responsible for building these houses – Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst – there was still a distinction to be made between houses for workers and a house for the Headmaster. The house was built for the Headmaster of Dartington Hall School in 1932 by a Swiss-American architect and was in so many ways emblematic of the extraordinary cultural shock that the Elmhirsts brought with them when they chose this mostly derelict medieval estate as the base for their social experiment. It is this shock that will form the basis of my work over the next couple of months, and I’ll be blogging regularly on where what and how.

Although the property still belongs to the Dartington Hall Trust, it is now leased and run by National Trust. That, too, is a cultural shock that I’ll be investigating from a number of angles over the course of my residency.

June 19Day 1

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Funny old days, Day 1s. This was no exception. It was one of those glorious early summer days that make you want to be outdoors, and was the kind of day that brings out the NT punters –– so there were lots of people visiting. It was a set up day really, so mostly I made a list of all the

things I had forgotten to bring or which I didn’t realise I needed. Biggest disappointment was the terrible mobile reception in my workspace which translated into terrible internet. Bum. Have ordered a boosting antenna in the hope that will bring in a better signal. There is 3G lurking around, but mostly it was in hiding today.

It’s a lovely space with lovely views of the allotments. I’m sharing the space with the lovely Sue Smith and hope that we’ll have some chance to crossover in our work in some way. She’s creating a new community choreography piece, as I understand it secondhand.

This certainly fits with her work, and I’m keen to see what she’s up to. Also met up with Heather Williams whom I used to know in my previous life at Dartington, when I was in my early twenties (which feels like a very long time ago, and is in fact a very long time ago!). Heather is in the studio next door which she keeps referring to as ‘her bathroom’. What I didn’t know is that Heather used to live in the house in the 1960s, and knows it well, and the room she is in with her jewellery was, in fact, a bathroom. The house was unusual in having four bedrooms and four bathrooms – something quite unheard of in England in the 1930s. Very modern! The other artists in residence are a bit more apart, physically, and what with today being a short day (‘cos I had to leave after lunch) and being a set up day I didn’t get to spend any time with them.

June 19Day 2: first challenges

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Tonight is the Private View for the current exhibition at the House, as well as an ‘introduction’ of the resident artists. So I’m hoping to get my red telephone kiosk working by then. I’m chancing a bit because I’m using an entirely new system to do this and I’m not quite sure if I’m going to

get it working in time.

I’ve spent the beginning of the morning however stringing an aerial for my broadband modem in the hopes of getting a better signal. So far I think it’s been in vain, and it’s also possible that the weather is going to conspire against me now that I’ve got the USB dongle sitting outside trying to get around the corner of the building in the hope of finding that elusive signal. We shall see…

The telephone kiosk is something I invented (well, that’s perhaps an overstatement) for an exhibition I did almost two years ago in Aller Park School which is also here on the Dartington Estate. It’s a very simple idea: wire a 1960s style cherry red GPO telephone to a computer such that when you lift the receiver it starts recording. In this way a very simple interface can be used to gather memories and stories. In actuality, people can’t quite believe it’s working, so last time I did this (which was all a bit last minute so no time for testing before it went live) most of the recordings said “is this thing working?” I broke the most basic rule of creating an interface: there was no visual feedback that anything actually happened when you lifted the receiver and in my desire to keep the technology completely transparent, it was in fact a little too transparent.

I had also not worked out how to sense whether the receiver was on or off the hook, just that it registered a change of state. So for quite a lot of the installation it was in fact recording when it was ON the hook and not recording when it was OFF the hook. Duh. Have hopefully solved that one now.

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Instead of using a Mac mini like before, I’m going out on a limb and attempting to use a Raspberry Pi. The R-PI is a fabulous little device that also give you a fuzzy warm feeling because it is built by a social enterprise and made in Wales not in China. However my programming skills are very very rusty and weren’t that good in the first place, and so I’m working on a pretty steep learning curve to get this all going by tonight. Fingers crossed.

❦ ❦ ❦

Well, I didn’t succeed in the end. In reality the Private View was too busy to be a good place to gather voices, and I’ll just have to allow that these things take time and live with missing an opportunity.

This is always the most frustrating time in a new project. Having decided to tackle learning a new technology, in particular one where the learning curve is steep and quite hard to navigate, the time spent rarely seems to have any relationship to the amount achieved. I’m beginning with an almost blank slate (in terms of knowledge) in that I’m delving into using the Raspberry Pi for the first time. The potential for this computer is amazing – £35 and immensely capable. As long as you can programme that is. The reason for being for this small device, which is about the same size as a pack of cards, is to get the very young programming. It’s made in the UK – literally – and sold by a social enterprise. How good is that? They have been selling like hot cakes, but it’s unclear at the moment the extent to which the original goal is being reached. There is some suspicion that many are being bought by people like me, tinkerers and hobbyists. The Pi doesn’t come with hundreds of apps, and compared to the bloated powerful machines we are used to working with every day, it’s a bit like going back to the 1980s. You are faced not with a pretty and powerful interface (although it does have a very standard user interface) but very few apps. Otherwise it’s spending time in the command line space, just learning commands and making things happen – very slowly.

I was delighted to discover that my old friend Max/MSP, which has been my mainstay as a person who builds interactive things, is sort of available for the Pi. In fact, it’s the free, slimmed-down version created by Miller Puckette and the team at UC Berkeley partly in response to the fact that Max/MSP had become unaffordable. Puckette was one of the original team behind Max, and I suspect there have been some interesting and fierce IP battles about all this. ‘PureData’ can run on most platforms,

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and I’ve spent the last couple of days getting it to run on the Pi, with help from lots of others out there who have already succeeded. I think I’m there, but ran out of time yesterday to really test it.

Doing this kind of brain-intensive work is quite challenging in the context of working in the House. I don’t look like an artist to most people, who find themselves in my space (“More artist studios THIS WAY —>>”) and think they have bungled into a private office. That’s a little awkward, so I do what I can to be welcoming and to explain to those who ask what I’m up to.

Many come to see the wonderful aspect from this lovely room as well as the fabulous Bauhaus built-in cupboards. I’ve been surprised at how many people have opined that “it’s lovely, but I could never live in a house like this”. I’d kill (well, perhaps not, but you understand the turn of phrase) to live in a house like this. It’s airy and light and a thing of beauty. Potentially cold in the winter, yes, but nevertheless it’s a house that is an object of beauty unlike so so many domestic constructions in this country, and anywhere else I’ve been. I think of continental Europe – the Netherlands in particular – where house design just seems so much more concerned with aesthetic and where clean and simple design etches its lines on the immediate landscape.

I will have to ask, one day, when someone says this in my studio. What, I wonder, is it that they are objecting to? Why could they not imagine themselves living there? Curiouser and curiouser.

Back to the coding.

June 27High Cross House Day 3

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A busy day in the House. I haven’t been there long enough yet to see whether there is a close relationship between the weather and the number of visitors, but I suspect there must be. Now that we are firmly in the ‘summer season’ even if not high summer, the visitor split based

purely on anecdotal evidence seems to be running about two thirds away-folk to one third locals. Anyone who is not on holiday counts as a local (are they sleeping in their own bed tonight?). This is all based purely on personal intuition and overheard conversations.

I continue to hear lots of comments about the house being lovely and marvellous and ‘very modern’ (not bad for an 80-year old) along with the big BUT (but I couldn’t live here, but it’s not very practical is it?, but it’s OK for rich people, but it’s…). Rarely are these comments about aesthetics, which I find fascinating. Does this explain the plethora of ugly housing in the UK? Is an ugly house more practical than a beautiful one? I know from spending time in the Netherlands (which I have) and in Scandinavia (which I have not) that affordable beauty is possible. Dutch cities in particular seem to prize design, and even the most quotidian objects are clean and beautiful.

My own work continues to be frustrated. I eventually took two steps forward yesterday, managing to get working what I had utterly failed to get working thus far. But (as if so often the way with new technologies that have many unknowns) in the process of making one thing work I managed to break another which had been working. In order to get my red telephone working I need both things to work. So on Friday I shall be back to where I was at the beginning, possibly having to build the software install from scratch. This happens and I have to remind myself that it happens. Doesn’t make it any less tedious or any less frustrating. It always feels like other forms of creative practice (surely) don’t have to deal with constant returns to base, but I know that’s not true either. It’s the form of insanity we choose to indulge in.

June 28High Cross House Day 4

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Now that I’ve officially been demoted from the visitor car park to the overflow car park (which I should have been using all along apparently) there is a short walk from the car to the House, up the main Dartington Hall drive. There is a narrow pavement that runs alongside the road

which heaves with summer at the moment. One section is full of nettles –– tall ones that pretend to reach out and sting you as you walk along –– together with red campion and another butter-cup-like flower that isn’t a butter-cup. Then curiously there is another section which is just grasses. Fortunately this hasn’t been mowed, and the grass is a couple of feet high and turning to seed. Soft and graceful, how grass should be. With rather less of an implied threat, the grasses too wave towards me as I walk.

All of that is a lovely start to the morning, It’s summer and it feels like summer, which after the past few miserable years is something of a pleasant surprise in itself. Inside, however, I continue to struggle in my battles with the new piece of hardware, the Raspberry Pi. Wednesday’s report of two steps forward and one step back has continued with stalemate: no steps forward and no steps back. Except that I fear I’m going to have to reinstall everything and start again, from scratch. Oh joy.

I know from previous experience that I will, eventually, get things working. Others have, and so will I. It’s not as though it’s a lost cause. I’ve been working on an automated device at home to attempt to make our resident rooks less comfortable with the idea of living there (that they may, in time, decide to move on is the hope (against hope?)). That, too, has been causing me no end of grief, so I’m feeling particularly aggrieved with the physicalities of hardware. I thought we lived in a digital age.

July 3A passing caress

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It’s been raining over the past couple of days, so the hedgerows are sagging a little, bearing the weight of the water as well as the burden of summer growth. As I walked up to the House this morning, the long grasses that felt so redolent of warmth and excess were leaning over

the pathway and impossible to walk past without feeling as though they were reaching out to be touched. Not in the way that trees sometimes do, or brambles, where you feel the caress is a malevolent one, but a gentle reaching out.

The walk is a little bittersweet today. On Friday, after I got home, it was to receive the email announcing that after only two years National Trust is leaving High Cross House. This feels very sad, and a failure of someone’s imagination. Although the official reason is that there have been insufficient visitors to justify the costs of keeping the house open, there is of course much murmuring (including inside my own head) about the missing back story. Although not representing a failure on the part of National Trust it feels like a minor disaster for the Dartington Hall Trust, whose efforts to bring people on to the Estate and turn it into a visitor attraction seem thwarted and increasingly wrong-headed. I’m the first to acknowledge (having recently had to close a charitable arts organisation) that maintaining the estate is a hugely costly business and that relying on external funding support is a hiding to nowhere. However, the drive to bring people seems to be at all costs, and many changes have been made that seem to sit uncomfortably with the place. The recent decision to turn the medieval White Hart Dining Room into a metropolitan-style tapas bar seems to represent this in extremis, and just makes me no longer want to visit here at all. Of course there are lots of oldies like myself who are going to whinge about change, and I’ve long been a vocal supporter of the current much maligned management and their constant drive to re-invent Dartington in ways

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that will generate more income. However, the noughties strapline of EAT, SLEEP, THINK seems to have been long left behind, with rather more of an emphasis on eating drinking and buying than on feeding the soul. Not a whole lot of self-investigation is required when buying a teddy bear at the (perennially empty) Visitor Centre.

Of course it’s all very well to bemoan the lack of intellectual curiosity and stimulation: it’s relatively easy to run a place for Utopian thought and social experiment when the pockets are very (very very) deep. Much harder when much of the endowment has gone and it’s all about income and profit centres. Nevertheless, others manage it. The recent emergence of the Dame Hannah Rogers centre at the former agricultural college site at nearby Seale Hayne seems a salutory lesson on how to create a vibrant and flourishing semi-urban cultural centre utilising old buildings that were created for educational purposes. Of course, they’re not Grade One listed and not at all in the same world as the Dartington estate, but the success of what has been achieved there feels palpable..

And so the Trust must now, once again, find a new use for this glorious house. In just a few months’ time it will once again be empty and feeling abandoned. It would make a fabulous home; it would make a fabulous lots of things, if only we were living in a different age or funded by other deep pockets. It’s Grade II* listing of course makes it even more challenging to find appropriate modern uses. This has been a house of art for the past two years, and much kudos goes to National Trust and to curator Emma Carter for making that happen: it’s been an important cultural contributor for visitors and artists alike. That will go now, and the visual arts will have no place here on the Estate for the first time in more than 70 years (not forgetting the residency programme at Space in the former College of Arts’ buildings, but the focus there is primarily on performing arts).

So, much preparing for tears and the waving of hankies as National Trust begins the long journey to withdrawal, abandonment and re-invention. Conspiracy theorists might note that ‘High Cross House’ is mis-spelled in the official estate map, as if the relationship has always been a troubled one. Even its early life was troubled: within five years of creating this wonderful home, Curry’s marriage had fallen apart: his wife returned to California, and he moved out.

July 4A busy day

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It’s busy and buzzing today in the House and this somehow seems to make people more open and communicative. I’ve certainly talked to more people today than I have on any day thus far. Although it’s beginning to clear now, it’s been overcast and a bit rainy this morning, so that people have

obviously decided to ‘do National Trust’ rather than do something more outdoors-y.

The House of course has also been abuzz with the news that the Trust is abandoning their lease. I have no idea how many other properties the Trust leases, but the relationship must feel very different from owning and maintaining a property. I’m sure this was always seen as a companion to then handsome Georgian home to Agatha Christie Greenway and Arts & Crafts-inspired Coleton Fishacre, both in their own way ‘belonging’ to the high-Modernist period of the 1930s.

I’ve talked more about my work today, and have begun to capture people’s comments. Tellingly, people have seemed more open to the house than in other days, but I’m sure there’s neither rhyme nor reason to this. Just the ebb and flow of humanity. It will be interesting to see, once the word is really out that these are now the last few months in which the house will be open, whether more locals begin to show up. I’m sure in the early days – less than two years ago – there were lots of local visitors, curious to see the inside of this iconic house. At the moment, however, the significant majority seem to be visitors from afar. Some have associations with Dartington (expect more of those in the coming months?), but others are simply here because it’s part of the National Trust ‘tour’.

The piano in the living room is being played now. The house comes to life when the piano is being played, and it makes a pleasant change from the playing of 1920s popular tunes, which seem almost singularly inappropriate to the house and those who lived here.

Off now, have to get some work done. I’m continuing to be frustrated with learning code and learning a new ‘instrument’. Progress is very very slow, but this doesn’t feel particularly unusual in its level of frustration. The shell is beginning to crack.

July 11Day 6: wires

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Finally some progress with the red phone, which will become known as The Message Phone. The phone will now record a soundfile when you lift the receiver. There’s a big red LED that lights up on the phone itself when the system is recording. This is my response to the problems I

encountered last time I built one of these, when I broke the first rule of interactive devices. As there was no indication at all that the phone was ‘doing’ anything, most people felt utterly unconvinced that it was recording despite the big notice right in front of them that you ‘just need to lift the receiver and start speaking’. Now, the phone tells you that it is recording, so hopefully we’ll be getting fewer recordings simply saying ‘is this thing working’ (as if it would answer back).

People’s response to me in the house has been different of late. Because yesterday I had a soldering iron out and a phone in pieces on the desk, people were much more interested than when I’m simply sitting behind a screen typing code. Someone sagely noted yesterday that I ‘had invented the answering machine’. Haha. I was wished luck many times for my endeavours. Finally, something to latch on to other than a man sitting behind a computer causing people to creep out because they think they have come into a private office (or just to ignore me completely). I’ve been much more open about engaging with visitors, too, so that probably helps.

Tomorrow (Day 7) I should finally finish the phone and get it installed in the study downstairs. It’s still got a few audio problems, and things are a bit stuffed into the phone, but I’m sure I will sort those out now that I’ve sorted out the tricky bit of coding that held me up for frustrating after frustrating day. How I ever did this stuff without help from the internet I can’t possibly imagine.

July 26High Cross House: first shock

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Phone all installed and working. We’ll see what ensues. Am now reading anything and everything I can get my hands on that might be of use in absorbing more about the cultural shock the house represented. Read a very interesting article originally written for Country

Life in 1932 which has been reproduced in numerous publications. It is a serious and thoughtful architectural critique that reflects quite explicitly on one of the primary issues that represented such a shock. It is clear from extant writing that Curry as the client and Lescaze as the architect cared ‘not a whit’ for convention and about paying homage either to vernacular or country house styles. At this time, building techniques had changed remarkably little for centuries, and most new houses at least in the countryside were built in much the same way as a house might have been built a hundred years earlier in what we now refer to as vernacular style. There were conventions to be paid attention to in terms of shape, so the sharp clean angles of the Bauhaus were the first shock – that’s no surprise to anyone. What is more interesting is the controversy around the exterior colour of the building

Curry and the architect seemed to have discussed this at length. Of course there was always an assumption that the primary colour would be white – that in itself represented a major departure from the vernacular stone buildings in this part of the country. Although we tend to think of the white-washed cottage as the chocolate-box convention, most were either bare granite (the local building material) or were rendered but unpainted. Smarter houses were also granite-faced, but with finished granite that gave a much more formal look.

The white house was almost unknown; a square house mostly white but with some walls also a bright cerulean blue was completely shocking, seen as an afront to the landscape. There seem to be

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some local assumptions that the colour was meant to mimic the sky and that the foreign architect simply didn’t understand the English climate enough to know that the sky isn’t usually this colour (it is today). However, the letters between Lescaze in New York and Curry in Devon make it clear that the colour was meant as much to offset the greys of the Devon skies as to complement the occasional days when blue sky predominates.

There was also much discussion in the correspondence about how the colour should be applied. The architect was insistent that the colour be applied to the final finish coat of concrete (using essentially a long-established painting technique of mixing colour into wet plaster) rather than being a coat of paint applied to the finished exterior. “This” Lescaze comments, “always leads to mess and imperfection”. There was disagreement between the architect’s instruction to use a metal trowel for this final coat, and the plasterer’s insistence that this would make it too smooth, causing it to glaze and crack. Clearly Lescaze’s instruction was not heeded, and the building has spent much of its life with lots of imperfections in the exterior paint, and much of its life without the blue colour the architect was so clear about - even though he did eventually write that he could ‘live with’ the house being entirely white should the builders be ‘unable’ to apply the blue properly.

It’s also interesting to note that the impetus for creating this modern house in this place was not that of the Elmhirsts (who were paying for it all) but of Curry himself. Lescaze, working from afar in New York, seemed to correspond entirely with Curry who was seen as the client. In the end it was Leonard Elmhirst who became convinced that the modernist approach had a great deal to offer (most of the discussion was about its appropriateness for educational buildings, as Lescaze was also designing some of the school buildings at the same time as building Curry’s house). Having taken the decision that High Cross House (then called High Cross Hill) was to be a national exemplar of the International Style, no expense was spared and the house ultimately cost more than £5,000, far more than Elmhirst had originally intended to spend in building a home for his new Headmaster.

July 31Loss

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The more I read, the more I muse on loss. I’ve always thought of the establishment of the Dartington experiment in the 1920s as an attempt to create a social utopia. It’s become clearer to me that this was in fact intended to be a utopia based on sound business principles, despite

the hefty capitalisation provided by the deep pockets of the Elmhirsts. Moreover it was an attempt to use ‘traditional’ rural craft and skills in a sound financial context. This was not capitalism extant but neither was it an expression of Marxism or communism. It was, rather, intended to provide a model for a functioning rural economy whilst simultaneously acting as a research centre and to provide education. Culture was but one part of what makes a functioning society, and always seen as an essential element of the work.

What I had not understood is that British agriculture was in crisis in the early part of the 20th century, and had been for at least sixty years. The increasing dominance of capitalist industry and its mavens, and the massive shift in the nineteenth century from rural to urban, resulted in intense political pressure for cheap food (people could no longer feed themselves off their own land). The Empire and former Empire countries such as America were well-resourced and well-placed to provide this, and as shipping techniques and food storage techniques improved there had been a steadily increasing flow of food from overseas. The increading power of the corporations led in 1846 to the repeal of the Corn Laws which had provided a guaranteed price for British farmers. This led directly to the slow and seemingly irrevocable decline of farming: a decline that was to last a century, when the end of the second world war, the introduction of mass mechanisation and the continuation of rationing brought farming back into political acceptability and precipitated the return of subsidy.

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The Elmhirst experiment was to bring in the talent to introduce modern approaches to farming and to other craft-base industries such as furniture-making, forestry, textiles, and glass making. There were no rose-tinted glasses here: the intent was to create a working Estate using modern business-centred approaches and techniques, many of which were imported from America. Initially education was intrinsic to this: pupils at the school worked on the Estate and this was seen as an essential part of their education. Eventually it became clear that this was not sustainable despite its high ideals, and the schools became as a separate entity in less than a decade. It was at this point that Curry was brought in to reform the school and establish it on a ‘proper’ albeit progressive footing.

My overwhelming sense in reading all of this is how much we have chosen to lose in favour of profit. We no longer make things: our ‘products’ are financial instruments, loans, office services, insurance, and so on. These are not, however you choose to justify it, things that are made – they are not products of anything other than minds obsessed with making money from nothing. Modern banking is a black art already proven to take us to the edge of fiscal extinction and the scapegoat for a rapacious attack on the public finances by an extreme right wing government. Making things is still a necessity, but we chose many decades ago to secede all making to states where people can be paid less –– much less –– retaining only high craft carried out by individuals working for themselves. Skilled trades remain of course, as do traditional skills such as boat-building but the vast majority of our heavy and dirty industry is gone. The country that invented the railways no longer has the knowledge, skills or infrastructure to build them. The Elmhirst vision was to retain making and craft within the context of a self-maintaining and self-regulating society in which culture and education were also a part. We have lost our interest in these skills, it seems, and just as we have divorced ourselves from the natural world on which we depend to eat and breathe, we have divorced ourselves from the grit, grind, noise, smell, and graft of making on an industrial scale. Ironically, what survives is agriculture despite the best efforts of successive governments to outsource this, too. As the inevitable and long-overdue reform of subsidy begins in earnest, as it surely will over the coming decades, what will happen? Will this skill, too, be lost to technocracy and cheap labour?

Finally, I feel the loss of the Dartington vision as the Estate careens from money-making idea to money-making idea, investing in failure, and seemingly divorcing itself almost entirely from the driving power of ideals. The careening is nothing new: Dartington has for the past 70 years been a place of experiment and risk: however it now feels as if what remains of the original vision is but a

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rump: what seems to be dominant above all is the maintenance of the Estate and its buildings. But they increasingly feel empty of anything meaningful, increasingly. What should be seen as core activity seem to be shoved further and further to the periphery. I’ve been reading the voices of so many who are now dead, so this writing is tinged with that loss. Some of this is however a tangible loss as the Estate shifts ineffably towards becoming merely a visitor attraction capable only of sustaining itself without any core or heart or reason or meaning.

Rainy and busyIt’s the first morning since I began the residency that I had to walk through the rain from the car park. Not much rain, but it feels like a bit of a shock when the weather has been so relentlessly summer. The rain appears to have brought out the crowds: the house is packed this morning. School holidays are now in full swing of course, so there are now family groups coming round instead of couples and DINKs on early holiday avoiding high summer prices.

Am disappointed so far with the phone thus far. Quite a lot of people have picked it up, but then done nothing – said nothing, asked nothing, not even really made puzzled noises. What, I wonder, are they expecting? I wonder if I have found the right language to describe what the phone is there for? Surely people are only lifting the phone in response to the message, but perhaps not? When I came in this morning the big red LED on the front of the phone had been pushed in – perhaps someone thought it was a button?

It’s leading me to believe that the next generation of the phone will also play files as well as record them. It wouldn’t be that difficult to effect, I don’t think. Perhaps this would give people something to bounce off?

Anyhow, the phone has now been moved to the main desk in the study, rather than being on a mantelpiece, so perhaps it will feel more ‘proper’ to leave a message or more people will give it a go. Time will tell. I’ll probably leave it until next Wednesday now.

Back to reading (although it’s going to be difficult with this many in the house).

August 2Musing on domestic architecture

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Interesting to look at the original plans for High Cross Hill. Built in the early 1930s by a Swiss-American architect whose firm was based in New York, it seems very clear from reading the extant correspondence that the architect rarely –– if indeed at all –– visited the site of what I assume to

have been a reasonably important domestic commission (particularly bearing in mind that this was the middle of the deepest recession ever). Curry had lived in the US during his most formative years and come to know and love the American expression of modernism.

Interesting cultural differences between then and now, and between the US and the UK stand out from the page when looking at the original plan.

The most obvious of these is the reference to the ‘First Floor’ (UK: Ground Floor) and ‘Second and Third floors’ (UK: First and Second…). Beyond that is most notable that the house had almost as many bathrooms as bedrooms, something unheard of in domestic British architecture at this time. Other differences are of time, some of place. There was much discussion in the correspondence about the external colour scheme (see posts passim) but interestingly the scheme provided by the architect and adopted at least when the house first opened, was white stucco for the main house, but with the servant’s ‘wing’ painted a cerulean blue. To the outside eye, this differentiation is not clear – it is simply that one part of the house is painted white and another part blue – but it seems an interesting delineation to choose.

What we would now refer to as the Master Bedroom is called the Master’s Bed Room (huge difference that one, even if it’s only a comma). I don’t know what this room would have been called in domestic architecture within Britain.

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On the ground floor (first floor) the rooms are:

1 Terrace (an outdoor space, probably no difference there, but unusual)

2 Living Room (are we more likely to refer to this as Sitting Room?)

3 Dining Room

4 Pantry (although probably not a cold pantry, showing the emergence of ‘electric refrigeration’ which was far more advanced in the US and in the UK)

5 Kitchen

6 Larder

7 Servants’ Entrance (not terribly likely to find one of those in a small family home these days but not so unusual in the 1930s)

8 Laundry (later correspondence shows that the laundry was abandoned in favour of a larger kitchen, on the grounds that the kitchen was too small and that ‘most of the laundry will be sent out’)

9 Servants’ Hall (actually quite a small living area for the two live-in staff )

10 Closet (would be referred to as a wardrobe in British English)

11 Main Entrance (front door?)

12 Entrance Hall

13 Coat Room & Toilet (referred to archaically in Britain as a ‘Cloakroom’, even now) Unlikely to find an extra toilet in a contemporary British home?

14 Garage. This was a large two-car garage attached directly to the house in the sense that it was possible to get from the garage to the house without going outdoors. The plan drawing shows a large ‘family’ car and an open top sportster.

15 Boiler Room (the house was centrally heated, again somewhat unusual even for a modern British home at this time).

16 Study (which Lescaze sometimes refers to as the ‘desk room’)

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On the first floor, the rooms in the original plan are shown as:

(not sure what happened to 17, 18, and 19)

20 Sun Terrace

21 Master’s Bed Room (see above)

22 Master’s Bath Room

23 Writing Room (jettisoned in the final design this would have been for the ‘lady of the house’)

24 Wardrobe (explicitly for clothes rather than ‘stuff’)

25 Daughter’s Bed Room

26 Daughter’s Bath Room

27 Terrace (also referred to as a sleeping porch, and accessible from both the main bedrooms. Nights when temperatures might encourage outdoor sleeping here in the UK are exceptionally rare, but relatively commonplace in many parts of the US)

28 Guest Bed Room

29 Guest Bath Room

30 Roof over Entrance

31 Linen Room & Shelves

32 Maids’ Closet

33 Maids’ Bed Room (this was in fact divided into two separate rooms, hence the plural possessive)

34 Maids’ Bath Room

This is a house designed for those with American sensibilities and attitudes to bathing. Similar houses in the UK would still most likely boast sinks in the bedrooms with shared bathroom facilities ‘down the hall’. Instead all of the bathrooms here are ensuite. Most of these features are now, needless to say, regarded as de rigeur.

August 7Announcing the Tea Party

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No, not the ghastly right wing nutters in the US, but the emerging project for High Cross House. I’ve been searching since the residency began to find something that feels appropriate to the House. I’ve found this quite challenging, particularly as I think there has been a subtle but

noticeable change of mood in the house since National Trust announced that they are withdrawing from their lease and closing the house in December. So I’ve spent some time wandering the downstairs (as opposed to being stuck in my bedroom-studio upstairs) and trying to think about where a sound installation might be and what would be an appropriate fit.

At the same time, part of the point of this residency was about my own creative development. I’ve already hit a milestone on that one by making the Message Phone, which is now installed and working well. Somehow I still need to find a better way to encourage people to leave an actual message rather than merely taking about how ‘cool’ the phone is… but that’s another story. About thirty messages have been left over the past week, of which only a handful are substantive in any way.

I always wanted to do something that reflects the domesticity of this building: that fact that this is a house built for a modest family and intended primarily as a family home. It’s an intimate space, and I somehow want to reflect this in the work. My current thinking is about creating a speaking tea set using melamine cups from the 1960s. Whilst not exactly high modernist, their sixties’ clean lines and the nature of the melamine as a material seems to fit the High Cross aesthetic. I couldn’t use china cups anyway because I’m likely to have to do some deconstructing and drilling and glueing along the way. I want the dining table simply to have a line of cups on it that can be picked up and listened to. This means not only building the sound entirely into each cup as a stand-alone unit, but also finding a way to charge the internal batteries without any wires. So my big technical challenge in the project is a) whether I can make the cups speak and b) whether I can work out how to charge them wirelessly whilst sitting on the table.

August 9Still brewing...

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Spent yesterday playing with various tiny modules and batteries that may ultimately fit inside a teacup to create my speaking cups. The little sound module I’m attempting to use seems to be notorious in not working, or in being very difficult – and so it is proving. It’s really quite

interesting that in the day of ubiquitous information and the dominance of English (in language) and China (in manufacture) it seems almost impossible to find understandable information about this little module. I couldn’t get it to work – at all – and on further digging it seems that the way the device operates is dependent on what mode it is set to in the factory. However most people who are selling the device don’t seem to know this, don’t seem to know whether they can get one set to the mode I want, or don’t understand the question. The documentation is both impenetrable and in quite poor English which makes things less than clear. On the plus side, I have successfully won an eBay auction for a set of 1950s melamine tea cups and saucers which aesthetically and practically seem perfect.

So although I have solved some of the technical challenges in trying to put standalone and self-maintaining sound into a teacup I have quite a few major hurdles to go before there is true progress.

The house continues to be busy. Interestingly (and purely anecdotally) this seems related not at all to the fact that the Summer School of Music is happening elsewhere on the Estate, but rather on the fact that it is now high season, and summer holidays are in full swing. When it doesn’t look like a beach-y kind of day, families head out to see the sights, and that includes visiting the nearby National Trust properties. What seems surprising is (again anecdotally) how many come without really

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knowing anything about what they are coming to see. The National Trust logo, it seems, is enough information for most. So there are those who are surprised to encounter a modernist house. And much confusion or mis-information about the school or why the house was built in the first place. We did have a visitor the other day who seemed to think that the school had been a Borstal – interesting to posit where that came from and whether it links back to the cultural shock the school and the Trust represented and the suspicion they engendered. Parts of this county are still fighting the Civil War which officially ended three hundred and fifty years ago, so it is perhaps to be expected that cultural shock of a mere eighty years distance still feels palpable and still feeds an active rumour mill.

Of course there are also visitors who are expert and have come with a critical and interested eye. They are sometimes designers or engineers who know a great deal about materials and want to know, for example, what kind of steel was used in the windows, or what veneer was used on the built-in furniture.

Most are somewhere in-between. Curious, interested, puzzled, a little unsure how to react.

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N took part in the Salcombe Regatta harbour swim this morning, along with at least 300 others. After that we had breakfast sitting down by the marina, rather than rushing home so that I could get to High Cross in time for my 10am start. It is my birthday, although as I’m one of those who never celebrates that is a poor excuse. It was, simply, a beautiful day, and the one thing that age is teaching me is that art, after all, isn’t everything, and that sooner or later life must be given a chance to be celebrated in other ways.

August 14A curious change

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Very busy day in the House. There has been a curious change today, which feels coincidental rather than having any particular meaning. It’s been a rainy day (not very, but mizzly enough to ‘feel’ rainy), and it’s the middle of the school holidays so the house has been very busy with

family groups and other holidaymakers (what a curiously old-fashioned ring that word has). However curiouser and curiouser the crowd that has come through today has felt much more engaged in the house than on many other days: children genuinely intrigued and interested, people asking sensible questions, people studying the furniture and the design and fabric of the house, engaging with the artists.

It is as though the high summer has brought a different kind of visitor to Devon – but that seems odd and doesn’t really correlate with the past couple of weeks which has equally been ‘high summer’. It’s as though the still, heavy damp air has brought about a stillness, a seriousness in people that is usually rather absent. As a rather serious person myself (having lived a life not so much well-examined as tediously and tortuously over-examined) I tend to find the general shallowness and unwillingness to engage frustrating and puzzling.

God, how pretentious that sounds.

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Had a wonderful chat with Mike Ormerod at the end of the afternoon. Mike grew up in the house – or at least, spent the magical years of his childhood from the age of 10 or so. We wandered around the outside of the house chatting about that time, as the house itself was too busy to attempt to do a sound recording. Mike conjured a time of an idyllic rural childhood, flavoured with and sharpened by the artiness and cosmopolitan additions of the Dartington School and the Dartington ethos and the many extraodinary artists and writers and musicians and thinkers who passed through. Most of the stories and reminiscences are simply of playing, of fully inhabiting both the house and the estate at large with a freedom that as a society we left behind long ago. I grew up in much the same era in suburban (what might now be called ‘semi-urban’ as there was a large farm at the end of the road and many green fields to escape into) northern England and in many ways enjoyed much of the freedom that Mike talks about. But not in the house. My house was a much more controlled space, and of course as a 1930s semi, a much more confined space. So much of the magic of living in High Cross House in the mid-sixties as a child was the freedom of a large house, children of other families living in the house, cats, pet rats and trees and cars and tractors to play on. This was a community full of curious, intelligent, engaged people who got up to things like building radios and stringing wires everywhere just to try and pick up Radio Caroline. This was not the rural life that many youngsters growing up not so far away on Dartmoor would have been experiencing.

I asked Mike whether, with hindsight, he thought the design of the house itself influenced this sense of freedom. His immediate response was that it was the size of the house, the sense of freedom brought about by the consciousness of the times and of those living in the house, the atmosphere created by his mother, and the fact that the house was ‘unimproved’ (in other words, presumably, little had been done to it since the 1930s).

His implication is that there is now a sense of preciousness brought about partly by the restoration in the 1990s and then by the rather corporate feel that comes with National Trust dressing. As we talked, we watched young children launching a teddy bear dressed in commando gear from a zip wire on the top balcony into the side garden. At one time it would have been the kids themselves who were sailing down any convenient wires or ropes.

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This is my last official week at the House. It’s possible that I may stay a little longer as I prepare the sound installation which goes in the first week of September, but I may not. It’s a mild, drizzly August day: farmers who have not yet cut wheat are now kicking themselves as they watch

crops soak up moisture just at the time when moisture is not what’s wanted. Many have, however. In recent days we’ve felt surrounded by the noise of combines, and have met combines or massive tractors or massive lorries loaded up with straw just once too often on the back lanes. Summer is feeling both ripe and a little tired. Even the cornfields are getting up to head height, which after the past few years of rotten summers feels like a major achievement on their part.

Onward with the tea set. It arrived yesterday so I was finally able to see if the various electronic bits will fit inside. I think they will, although there will be issues around the wireless charging and whether it will work through two layers of plastic. I’ve also purchased a wireless-charging ‘PowerMat’ and taken it apart and it seems as though will be relatively easy to hack. Unlike a completely home-brewed system however I’m limited by the maker’s design which is to restrict the range of the device. This may make it more difficult to use.

I’m also going to have to have two tiny buttons showing, which is a shame in terms of design. I’m hoping that these will be visually very minimal, and I don’t yet know where they will be. Hopefully I’ll be able to have them available without too much compromise to the design and without compromising the structure of the cup itself. The cups are rather beautiful, although they would for decades have seemed naff. Hard to estimate the age, but sometime in the 1950s or 1960s is probably a good estimate.

August 19Moving out

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Hard to believe that the residency is already over, and so much more to do! It was my last day on Friday so I duly have moved out and on. However I’ll be returning to the House in a couple of weeks (ulp) to install the teaset piece, and today is my deadline for making the artist statement

and piece description. I still have rather a long way to go before being certain that the internal bits (the technology) will work and the external bits (the content and the design) will be rich enough. I do know that I need to gather more voices and I need to listen in detail to the 160+ recordings that have been collected on the Message Phone (see posts passim).

Having explored some practicalities of installing the piece in the Dining Room, it has now moved from the dining table to the sideboard for the simple reason that there is no power available around the dining table without trailing a cable. Having studied wireless charging I do know that in theory it would be possible to power the whole project wirelessly, but that this would be complex, difficult to achieve, possibly dangerous, and overall just not terribly practicable for a project that opens in two weeks. Oh, and I’m going away for four days this week, making the time even shorter. So, now the teacups will sit like a teaset on a tray on the sideboard, conveniently trailing its power cable down the back of the sideboard.

We have a lovely tray made by a dear friend that I had hoped to use. N not convinced that this is a great idea because of its preciousness; me not convinced that it’s a great idea because I don’t think it will hold more than three teacups and I really need a minimum of four. So begins the search for a larger appropriate tray. Am also tussling with the idea, in order to complete the overall conceit, of including a teapot (without sound). Unsure.

The change in visitors seemed to continue last week and I now have a theory. This summer crowd tends primarily to be families with young children, rather than those without children and/or those whose children have long since grown up and are therefore able to get away out of high season because they do not have children in school. So this high season crowd self-selects to be those who are visiting NT properties because they are genuinely interested in NT properties (etc), rather than simply trying to find something to ‘do’ during their holiday. This is perhaps borne out by the fact that many of the children accompanying their parents on visits to NT properties (etc) seem genuinely interested rather than bored or irritated. My theory, purely anecdotal.

September 15What’s in a name?

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What we now know as High Cross House was originally known as ‘High Cross Hill’ –– so sometimes I have made reference to ‘High Cross Hill’ as well as using the current ‘High Cross House’ designation. I had assumed that this name had been consigned to history once the

house was completed (it’s always referred to by Curry and in the architect’s plans as High Cross Hill). However for some reason I was recently looking at the listing of properties in the UK which are listed for protection. There are, not surprisingly, quite a number of very old and not so old buildings on the Dartington Estate that are listed, and I noticed that the listing for this property still refers to it as High Cross Hill. So we know that in the 1980s it was still being referred to by this name.

When does a place become a building? To me, the name High Cross Hill suggests a place, chosen for its beauty perhaps, certainly for its location. It suggests a space for being rather than a container for living. It makes me wonder whether the house became a House only after it ceased to be a place where people actually lived.

What’s in a name?

September 23Out of the house

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Well, it’s out of my house anyway. Yesterday I installed ‘teatime’ in the former kitchen at High Cross House, on an original piece of kitchen furniture designed (we think) by Lescaze and built by Staverton Builders specifically for the house. The original plan was for the piece to

sit on the sideboard in the Dining Room, but for the usual last-minute logistical reasons, it’s going in the Kitchen instead. I’m happy, partly because of the piece of furniture it’s sitting on, and partly because it’s in a slightly quieter place which will make it easier for people to dwell and listen. The other artist who is currently installing in the Dining Room apparently wasn’t too happy with sharing the space with a jabbering teaset, but the artist who is now hung in and around the kitchen is making work in response to music, which makes me much happier. She’s also happy to share, and I like people who share.

Having solved the technical issues around the tea tray, the last few weeks has been focussed on content. I’m tremendously grateful for my ‘voices’ (Mark Leahy, Hugh Nankivell, Alicia Grace, Lucinda Guy, Catherine Guy) and to Jon Stein who has been a resident writer/pianist over the summer and who played a lovely 20-minute set for me on the piano in the Living Room. I’ve also decided to publish a book of these writings. Over the past months the House and what it represents have grown close to my heart. I’ve known this house since I was 18, and have observed it go through several lives, very much from a remote viewpoint. The house has struggled, having several flushes of delight at finding a new purpose, and at other times sitting unloved and unremarked. One of those high points was in the 90s (during much of which I was living in the US) when the house was renovated and became the home for the Trust Archive. At some point - I don’t know how things worked in the sequence of time - the Archivist was made (largely) redundant and the Archive was given to Devon

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County Council and moved to the Devon Heritage Centre (what used to be known as the Devon Records Office until some marketer decided that wasn’t sexy enough). This means that it is properly stored and catalogued and widely accessible, but it means it is no longer ‘at home’. Had tea yesterday with Mary Bartlett who has lived and worked at Dartington for pretty much all her life, and was musing on just how many people visit the archive now that it is on an industrial estate north of Exeter rather than being ‘at home’.

What I don’t know is where National Trust fits into all this. It seems like there was a significant gap between the Archive moving out and the public announcement about National Trust taking on the lease of the building, but back-room negotiations can take years, so who knows the wheres and whys and wherefors.

Nevertheless, the process of building content has caused me to reflect further on what has been lost here. Despite its faults and contradictions, the School that was so dear and so central to the vision of the Elmhirsts, was a place of wonder in terms of reflecting a deep belief in the goodness and innate intelligence of young people. Curry absolutely believed - as did the people he gathered around him - that with nurture and guidance and the best possible conditions, all young people would find their own way to thrive. Many of the tenets of child-centred education have of course become the mainstream in the past fifty years, but within a state systems predicated on measures of value and success that have nothing at all to do with the individual and everything to do with convention, the essence of child-centredness doesn’t stand a chance. Clearly the vast majority of young people who attended one of the Dartington Schools for however many years had an incredible experience and many went on to live extraordinary lives. Most however also came from privileged, educated and non-mainstream families so that their chances of success in life were already set, and they could (possibly) have thrived at any school. Who knows? It’s also interesting to realise that the golden years of the school were those few years between Curry arriving in 1931 and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. During the war years the school struggled tremendously: many parents removed their children to America as a safe haven, others were of nationalities who were not allowed to remain at large because they were ‘the enemy’ and either also went into exile or, presumably, into internment camps. Some of the school buildings became the home of evacuees. The finances of the school were hit very hard, and never, it seems, really recovered. After the war much of the talk seems to have been of financial struggle, and increasing compromise.

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By the mid-1908s all the schools had closed, many with sad tales of financial disarray, sexual misadventure, and even death due to drugs or alcohol. These closures left a deep scar on this place, and today both the Junior School and the Senior School sit empty Two years ago I designed a sound installation for the old Junior School as part of a school reunion during which the boarded-up building (which is rife with asbestos and home to many bat colonies) was opened up for the duration of the reunion and exhibition. I think for most who visited (the majority of whom had been at the school) it was a deeply troubling experience. So many spoke of the Junior School as a magical place, a special time in their lives. To see this building abandoned, empty, and apparently without hope of a new life, seemed like a body blow to everything the school and its people stood for and the lofty ideals and vast amount of capital that went in to its creation. Such, it seems, is the destiny of all too many great intentions.

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High Cross House, however, was abuzz with activity yesterday as the latest show was being installed. There is some gorgeous work and I look forward to seeing it all finished. I had the simplest install ever! The piece is completely self-contained, and (despite the fact that in the last few days some gremlins have been appearing in the technology) it was simply a matter of arriving, setting the tray on to its furniture, plugging it in, and well... leaving. I hope it’s all working today! The show opens tomorrow.

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It’s been running for a couple of weeks now, not entirely without problems, but largely OK. People seem to be enjoying listening, but as ever it’s hard to persuade people to reach out and touch and then to pick up and listen. The overwhelming training and ethos of the museum is to NOT touch, and National Trust houses are all too often just museums. Do I make a big sign? Don’t know...

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Emma Carter and National Trust for making the residency programme at High Cross House happen; to everyone who talked to me as they passed through the house and shared their ideas and thoughts; to Heather Williams for her companionship and words; to Nancy Sinclair my wonderful partner and editor.

And thanks to Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst without whom none of this would have happened in the first instance.

‘teatime’ ran from September 25 to November 17 2013 at High Cross House, Dartington Hall, Totnes, Devon. Visit www.richardpovall.net/teatime for more information and to listen to the audio.

Cold Ridge Press ❦ www.coldridgepress.com