News

The scene was set: it is Spring 878 and Guthrum the Dane is leading a great army towards Winchester. The inhabitants of Winchester are fearful, uncertain as to whether their king, Alfred, will be able to defend them…

A packed house at The Arc, Winchester on 20th June enjoyed an interactive evening exploring life in Winchester in the late ninth century learning how this period has shaped England and the English language today and why 878AD. 

Infact, as the eager audience discovered, events turned in Alfred’s favour at the ensuing Battle of Eddington, cementing both his reputation and a key date in our local history.

The event brought together experts from the University of Winchester, Hampshire Cultural Trust, The English Project and Winchester’s latest visitor attraction, 875AD.  Those present enjoyed the opportunity to hear from and to question some of the key designers of the 875AD experience:  Prof Ryan Lavelle, Prof Bill Lucas, Prof Christopher Mulvey and Jaane Rowehl.

22 March: PROJECT leaders hoping to create an English language museum in Winchester have moved closer to realising their goal. 

Prof Bill Lucas said the project has moved “in very promising ways” after working closely with Hampshire Cultural Trust (HCT), the organisation tasked with protecting the county’s culture and heritage. 

It comes after plans were revealed to create another new museum, celebrating the city’s Anglo-Saxon heritage.

Prof Lucas said: “We now envisage the English Project’s English Language museum to be co-located with the Anglo-Saxon museum being suggested by HCT. The link is Alfred.

“We imagine a museum, or perhaps more accurately a dynamic visitor attraction, which invites visitors into Anglo-Saxon Winchester where they can hear English being spoken and see the extraordinary impact that Alfred made ‘at first hand’.

“From there visitors can either explore the story of English as it developed from Alfred’s first insistence that his priests translated Latin into English right up to the modern day, explore the Anglo-Saxon heritage of the city and its key role in the birth of England, or both.

“Our approach will be highly interactive and make use of leading edge technology, connecting visitors with digital collections across the world and interpreting the story of English through time and place and people.”

As previously reported, details of the proposed museum are few and far between due to the early stage of the plans, which was revealed by Winchester City Council leader Cllr Caroline Horrill as part of its Central Winchester Regeneration (CWR) project, otherwise known as Silver Hill 2.

Cllr Horrill confirmed the museum would be based in the CWR area, adding: “We will be supporting a museum on the site.” 

A spokesman for HCT added: “Winchester is one of our finest English cities. It is the ancient capital of England established by King Alfred as the centre of his kingdom of Wessex. It is where the creation of Anglo-Saxon England began.

 “This story of England’s lost capital is one of international importance that needs to be told and celebrated.

“Our intention is to connect Winchester’s outstanding heritage offer and create a new immersive museum experience where stories come together and are brought to life for the community and the many tourists who come to our city.

“The excavated archaeology and that which remains hidden underneath the city streets are the most important elements of this story.

“The proposed new museum provides us with the opportunity to reveal and share this with everyone.

“Our aim is to undertake a professionally run archaeological excavation during construction which will involve local communities, schools and universities across the city.”

However, Prof Lucas said other options were still possible. He said: “Many years ago the English Project suggested the Woolstaplers Hall – currently home to Marks & Spencer in Winchester High Street – as a potential venue and, as the city’s Silver Hill thinking becomes clearer this remains a possibility.”

Prof Lucas also confirmed plans of a new exhibition coming to Winchester in 2021. He said: “Together with HCT, we are planning an exhibition in the Discovery Centre featuring a famous text from the British Library, which will involve us in demonstrating some of the approaches to curating a museum of English, which we will be using in the museum.”

Read the original article by Michael Symour in the Southern Daily Echo here.

The Eurotales Conference of International Language Museums, February, 2017:

 The people behind 10 language museums met in the splendour of the restored chapel of San Jacopo at the Istituto Lorenzo de Medici, Florence, to share experiences on various ways to educate and enthuse about their languages at the Eurotales conference.

Florence is itself a town filled with treasures. A short distance from the conference, a separate linguistic treasury led the world in its own language enterprise for over 450 years. The Accademia della Crusca has a rich history of leading on the development of the Italian language. Said to be the oldest language academy in the world (founded 1583) the Accademia created its dictionary of the Florentine language in 1612, inspiring a range of other language dictionaries across Europe. Now the Accademia is recognized as the greatest authority on the Italian language in the world.

Representatives from across Europe, Canada and South Africa filled the Eurotales event with a wealth of contributions, which included a warm reception for the developing plans toward our own English Project. A range of language collections of all sizes and shape shared ideas and good practice. And across the collection were language museums from all sorts of background – some state-funded, some private, some very personal to their creator, some university-sponsored, some academic, some more mainstream.

Organised by an intrepid team from the universities of Rome, Florence, and Ankara, this conference addressed issues such as how do we engage visitors with language artefacts and activities; what is the theory underpinning language-museum practice, and what can we all learn from the journey each museum has taken?

To name-check just a few, the Canadian Language Museum, Toronto developed as a portable exhibition to be packed on a train or into car to tour and is the brainchild of Elaine Gold, who blazed a trail similar to that of The English Project, working with a local university to kick-start her exhibitions. Looking to our European friends, we have developed a strong link with Stephanie Lebreton, Director of Le Musee Champollion, Figeac, France, where a local authority regeneration project led to the new and exquisite museum of writing, which hosts themed exhibitions annually to keep new faces visiting.

From Esperanto in Vienna to Afrikaans in Paarl; Lithuanian in Vilnius to Occitan in Cuneo, a treasury of language experience filled the historic chapel for 3 days and many good contacts and friends were made for The English Project. The tone was very much one of international co-operation among language collections. Many of these museums (itself a contentious and perhaps misleading term) celebrate connections between and across languages, many discuss the variety around languages and the diversity within them: the wealth was very much in the range and scale of experience present.

Our conference was a stimulating forum for ideas. Personal friendships were forged in discussions – and, thanks to the generosity of our hosts, over good food and wine. It was fascinating to see the range of views about language policy and the perennial, thorny dilemma of funding. We were all left keen to visit each others’ projects – though some are more ‘virtual’ than others.

There was great excitement at the latest developments in The English Project and much praise for our mission that our mission is descriptive, open-minded, outward-looking – and fun. There was particular interest in the way we might engage with the topic of loanwords (or borrowings) from other languages into English; in our year of the English language and India, food for thought.

Marcus Barrett

Trustee, The English Project