West Midlands: Boscobel House Site Reinterpretation Consultation Project

In 2009 Outreach ran a small consultation project at Boscobel House and the Royal Oak, one of our EH sites in the West Midlands in partnership with the Properties Presentation department. The Interpretation team had got some funding to re-interpret the site, and were keen to do some consultation with potential visitors with a range of disabilities. The site’s current interpretation scheme has been in place for over 20 years.

Boscobel House Site_Reinterpretation Consultation Project We held focus group sessions for visually impaired people, young adults with learning disabilities and wheel chair users as part of this project, working with many of the same volunteers we had done previously in the Access to Witley Court project in 2004 (See Witley Court Revisited web page). Unfortunately we were unable to work with people who were Deaf or hearing impaired on this occasion.

We invited the groups to separate sessions and asked them to feedback on how the site is currently presented in terms of information and interpretation, and make recommendations on how we can make it more accessible.  We also filmed the sessions. A DVD will be available from April 2009 which we hope will be a useful resource for other heritage sites who wish to run similar consultation projects.

For more information about the project, please contact Suzanne Carter, Outreach Manager for the West Midlands: Suzanne.carter@english-heritage.org.uk  or 0121 6256870 or Lisa.hill@english-heritage.org.uk  from the Properties Presentation department.