Robert Southey's Keswick: Enhancing Understanding of the Literary Culture of the Northern Lake District

This project develops the impact of the open access digital edition The Collected Letters of Robert Southey: 1791-1815. Loved and loathed by his contemporaries, Southey (1774-1843) was a highly controversial Romantic Poet Laureate, essayist and historian. He lived for 40 years in the north Lake District market town of Keswick and his grave is in one of the town's churchyards. The Keswick Museum holds a unique, substantial and underused collection of manuscripts, books, portraits and other items by and associated with Southey, his family and his friends. This archive was a key resource for The Collected Letters.

Keswick Museum is the major local heritage organisation. In 2017-8 it welcomed 19,419 visitors and provided on-site educational sessions to c.5600 schoolchildren from the immediate surrounding area. This project will collaborate with Keswick Museum to help it transform the way it is able to present the significance of Southey and his circle to its visitors and to key stage 2 school teachers and pupils in the region.

The project's objectives are:
to increase Keswick Museum's ability to present Southey and his circle as a visitor attraction.
to develop Keswick Museum's on-site, sustainable expertise in its Southey collections.
to collaborate with Keswick Museum to create a resource encouraging visitors to explore 'Southey's Keswick' and to discover and enjoy a key part of the town's cultural heritage.
to extend the reach and range of Keswick Museum's KS2 education programme, particularly in literacy, and embed Southey and his circle in it for the first time.
to develop awareness and knowledge of Southey and his relationship to Keswick as part of the region's wider Cultural Tourism strategy.

The project team will achieve these by working with Keswick Museum to develop new attractions that draw on its Southey collection. These will include a display of the Museum's Southey holdings, a guidebook, a leaflet taking visitors on a walking tour of 'Southey's Keswick', and educational materials for use by Key Stage 2 teachers and pupils working on literacy. The latter will include a 'touring box' that can be used by those local schools who are unable to visit the Museum. The project will further enrich visitors' experiences by training Keswick Museum's volunteers to interpret the new Southey display for visitors and to give guided walking tours. A publicity release for Lakes Culture will further promote 'Southey's Keswick'.

This work is important and timely because it engages with two areas of well-defined local need: the tourist economy and education. The Lake District is exceptionally dependent on tourism to sustain its economy and attracts 41m. visits every year. Keswick is still recovering from the severe floods of 2016, and wishes to develop and grow all aspects of its ability to attract visitors. The literary heritage of Keswick and the north Lakes is rich, but comparatively under-developed. It has no sites that can compare with the visitor numbers attracted to sites in the south Lakes associated with Beatrix Potter (250k visitors p.a.) and William Wordsworth (50k visitors p.a.). This will use a key local resource (the Southey collection at Keswick Museum) to raise the visibility and attraction both of a key local celebrity (Southey) and of local cultural heritage. It thus offers a significant opportunity to enhance the value of a potentially important cultural destination in the north Lakes area. By collaborating with Keswick Museum to enhance and extend its work with schools, the project will also contribute to local educational agendas. It will allow teachers and pupils from the region to use and benefit from new learning resources that draw on their local literary heritage and their local history. For the first time, the provision of a 'touring box' will make Keswick Museum's educational offer available to those schools that are further afield and unable to visit the Museum in person.

This project provides an opportunity to create both value and benefits arising from the original AHRC-funded research on The Collected Letters of Robert Southey both for non-academic collaborators, primarily Keswick Museum (KM), and for the wider public of local residents and businesses in Keswick and the north Lakes and visitors to this area. The project seeks to build a range of interactions and engagements which will allow KM to make much better use of its Southey collection and to use these holdings to enhance and enrich the experience of local people, including schoolchildren, and visitors to Keswick.

KM will benefit in three key ways:
1. KM will be able for the first time to take intellectual control of its Southey holdings, one of its greatest assets, by creating an extensive and engaging display of Southey material, supported by appropriate labelling and information and by an interpretative guidebook.
2. KM will be enabled to greatly enhance its educational outreach activities and outreach constituency by producing learning materials related to its Southey holdings that can be used to develop literacy in KS2 pupils and that can be easily delivered both on-site and in those schools where economic constraints prevent teachers and pupils visiting KM in person.
3. KM's Southey holdings will be used to encourage KM's visitors to explore Southey-related sites in Keswick and the surrounding area, through guided tours by trained volunteers, a leaflet and the creation of a publicity release and a draft cultural itinerary for Lakes Culture.

The project therefore will better equip KM to fulfil its mission to bring key people, events, objects and places from Keswick's past alive in ways that are meaningful for its twenty-first century audiences, both those interested in cultural heritage and local KS2 teachers and pupils. By so doing the project hopes to increase footfall in KM and also to Keswick and the north Lakes, and to increase KM's ability to reach more schools with its KS2 literacy work.

Moreover, this project will also enrich the experience of those interacting with the Southey collection at KM. The permanent display and guidebook will make accessible a much wider range of Southey material and allow its significance to be interpreted more fully by local people and visitors. The volunteer guides will be trained to link KM's Southey-related exhibits to Keswick and the surrounding area and enhance the appreciation of users of these sites, allowing them to put them in a deeper cultural context. The KS2 learning materials will provide a new and engaging way of teaching literacy to schoolchildren through material related to KM's holdings and to their local environment. The educational 'touring box' will also allow KM to engage with a larger constituency of schools thus enabling a broader range of children to engage with and benefit from a fresh understanding of their local cultural heritage and history. The publicity release for Lakes Culture will advertise the project widely and the draft cultural itinerary has the potential to support businesses and organisations seeking to grow their appeal to cultural tourists. The project will therefore reach out to a wide audience of both local people and visitors (7m. p.a. to Keswick), ensuring the widest possible impact on its beneficiaries.