Historic Houses, Global Crossroads: Revisioning Two Northern Ireland Historic Houses and Estates

Our aim is to:

1. Make these heritage assets unfamiliar again as global crossroads, enabling multiple global and local publics to meaningfully connect their lived experience with them;

2. Co-produce replicable models for the heritage sector of historic houses and their environs as entangled locales of diplomacy, international ecological exchange, interconnection, identity reflection and formation.

Our international team of specialists from four UK universities, the National Trust, National University of Singapore, and University of Toronto, alongside curators, grounds staff, trustees and seven highly committed cross-sectoral partners, have collaborated over 18 months to:

a) offer transformative interpretation, new knowledge and innovative public programming to an enlarged, diverse set of audiences through targeted outreach, digital storytelling and ground-breaking publications;

b) establish new networked relationships between local and international communities, ethically unlock the extraordinary visitor and research potential at each site of unstudied Indigenous, Chinese, South and SE Asian and Arctic materials, and link material culture with originating and diasporic communities;

c) give scholarly and international public prominence to under-researched material culture and ecologies via workshops, creative residencies, a suite of accessible, interactive digital outputs, and interdisciplinary exhibitions;

d) generate capacity in inter-community collaboration and applied environmental knowledge (Clandeboye) and expand public understanding of rising water levels and biodiversity loss (Mount Stewart);

e) realise a pressing National Trust policy aim to drive innovative programming using data by developing a field-leading transferable Choice Modelling Cultural Value Analysis at Mount Stewart, shared with Clandeboye Estate, and discussed across the world's econometrics, GLAM, and heritage policy sectors;

f) foster impactful new dialogue between previously siloed historical, ecological, agricultural, heritage, and econometric practice and research;

g) impact and empower schoolchildren embarking upon the new OCR Natural History GCSE;

h) co-produce creative, experiential public-facing outputs that beneficially engage new local and international audiences.