The project will explore environmental histories of the designed landscape of Sheringham Park in Norfolk, since 1987 the property of the National Trust. The aim of this research is to build upon the outcomes of the PI’s Director’s Impact Fellowship to address current debates about the implications of environmental change for the restoration, management and interpretation of publically accessible designed landscapes of high cultural value. The research will build on the outcomes of an established working partnership between the Director’s Impact Fellowship and the National Trust, and develop those with two related RECN projects(‘Local places, global processes’ and ‘Anticipatory histories of landscape and wildlife’), in a collaborative, teamwork research model of wider application for deploying arts and humanities perspectives on environmental change. It will examine how a designed landscape can be conserved and displayed when there is no longer the economy and labour which once sustained it and explore the ways in which the mentality as well as materiality of this past landscape can best be communicated effectively to the visiting public. It will take advantage of the topicality of the design, the bicentenary of its 1812 design by Humphry Repton, undertaking new archival, library and field research to situate the designed landscape of 1812 within a broader context of estate management of the time, to rethink Repton’s 1812 design in a way which will both raise its profile at Sheringham as a major example of landscape architecture and place it in a longer and wider environmental history of the site and within longer histories of environmental change: local, regional, national and global. It will examine the values and narratives of environmental change which shaped the original design process, its symbols and story lines, compare the way the Repton landscape at Sheringham is interpreted and managed to examples of his work on the ground elsewhere and describe how a designed landscape can interpreted as lived in, worked on and moved through as well as looked at. The project will deploy an understanding of Sheringham’s history to engage with the development of the National Trust’s policies and practices on conservation, heritage and learning, particularly in regard to coastline and woodlands. The project will produce a series of related outcomes: a small public exhibition at Sheringham Park in July 2012, an academic conference at the University of East Anglia exploring the restoration and interpretation of designed landscapes for public understanding, a scholarly article on the practical and interpretative issues arising from the research on Sheringham, and a landscape and environment trail around Sheringham Park weaving together key locations and views on the Sheringham estate with their environmental and landscape histories. Furthermore research materials will inform a chapter of the book Living Landscapes and feature on the companion website, as well as being made available for a new edition of the National Trust catalogue for Sheringham Park. All project members involved in the collaboration will benefit from the research and from the inter-disciplinary process involved in its undertaking. The National Trust team of employees and volunteers will also benefit from their involvement in the project, in learning from the methods of conducting landscape history and engaging with visitors that will be employed by the research team.

The "Building Commons Knowledge" research project will build upon the success of AHRC-funded Contested Common Land project. It will create new pathways to both knowledge exchange and research impact through a programme of community workshops and commons sustainability workshops, and through the development of a new comprehensive online resource for researchers, community groups and public bodies with an interest in the history and contemporary sustainable governance of common land. It will create a comprehensive database and bibliography of commons available to all and will also develop a 'commons community history toolkit' of materials to equip local stakeholders and community groups to capture the history of common land. The project will also build upon the knowledge exchange developed by the Contested Common Land project, and extend it's impact by bringing its research outputs to a wider audience of key policy community members and stakeholders. Finally, the on-funding project will seek to foster sustainable self regulation of the modern commons by stakeholders, and will seek to promote a fuller understanding among key stakeholders of the interaction of common property rights with the legal and economic instruments used to promote sustainable commons management. The project activities will have two strands: (i) a programme of Community History workshops at which local community groups and commoners will be trained in the use of a community 'toolkit' for recording the histories of their own commons and (ii) two commons sustainability workshops focusing on the ecology of common land and its preservation, and on the role of common land in promoting sustainable rural communities. The project will culminate in a national Conference - "Sustaining the Commons"- for commoners, community groups, other stakeholders, the policy community and representatives of public bodies with responsibility for commons management. The project's work programme will be delivered with the active participation of two project partners - the Foundation for Common Land and the National Trust. The Foundation for Common Land is the national body representing commoners' associations in England and Wales and has umbrella groupings of commoners in four regions: Cumbria, Yorkshire, Wales and South-West England. The National Trust has, since its inception, been one of the largest owners of common land in England and Wales. The purchase and preservation of common land was one of the principal objectives for which the National Trust was formed and it currently manages 11 per cent of the commons in England. The promotion of the sustainable management of common land is a key policy objective of the Trust, and integral to its wider vision to promote sustainable rural communities. The Trust has a keen interest in new work that helps us to better understand the history of common land resources and how commons function in specific locations, and in work that identifies future management models that take us beyond the 'simple' model of National Trust ownership. The "Building Commons Knowledge" research project will explore these themes in close collaboration with the Trust.

UEA's virtual Open Day, May & June 2012 - A Research for Community Heritage Ideas Bank: starting with your idea To explore the potential of research for community heritage we need to start with ideas. Our experience at UEA tells us that the process is much the same, whether the idea originates in the community or in the academy. An idea always leads to further questions and many possible leads. At this stage it is important to ask the right questions, provide the right advice and find a focus. As a part of the 'brokerage' phase in the wider AHRC initiative linked with the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) and potentially other partners, UEA's Research for Community Heritage Ideas Bank enables us to start with the idea. This virtual bank, accessed via webpages hosted on UEA's website, linked via key partner networks and promoted via a communications plan that will include face-to-face events and meetings by a team of postgraduate researchers, will gather ideas from communities and from researchers. Our wrap-around engagement and support activities for all stakeholders, before and after the live deposit period, will underpin and provide a platform upon which researchers and communities can come together and co-create a blueprint for the community heritage projects which may be eligible for the HLF funding. Why a virtual ideas bank - UEA is located on the hinterland of East Anglia, a region with a population of around 3.4 million people living in rural, town, city and coastal communities in Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire & Essex. Hosting one or more open days either on campus or at different locations would not enable us to reach a broad enough audience and might even attract only the 'usual' suspects; that is, those who already engage with the University. The virtual Ideas Bank will give the project another dimension by enabling us to scale up our reach throughout the Region. The Ideas Bank will also be open to all UEA researchers in HUM and in other UEA faculties, particularly the Faculty of Social Sciences of which two members of the research team are members.

Tapestries are large and heavy and damage may be caused while they are on continuous display, not only because of their sensitivity to the environment but also through the stress imposed by their own weight. This load becomes more significant as the tapestry ages and its component materials degrade. The effects of deformation under a constant load are well understood within engineering and procedures exist for monitoring deformation. Applying engineering techniques to the monitoring of damage caused by hanging tapestries would enable areas of degradation to be identified before it is apparent that damage is occurring. Such monitoring would allow the optimum time for conservation treatment to be predicted and different methods of treatment to be quantitatively evaluated. It would help to ensure that funding available for conservation is used most effectively. The work would have wider applications for the treatment of other textiles. Although such techniques have recently been applied in the cultural heritage sector, this remains a small and pioneering field and these techniques have not been applied to tapestry conservation. \n\nThe interdisciplinary research team at the University of Southampton, consisting of researchers from the Textile Conservation Centre (TCC) and the School of Engineering Sciences, has completed a pilot study investigating a number of possible techniques for monitoring tapestries. The work examined contact and non-contact techniques, including optical fibre strain gauges, electronic speckle pattern shearing interferometry (ESPSI), thermography and photoelasticity. \n\nThe results of the pilot study indicated that optical fibres can be attached directly to a tapestry-like material and that the strain is transferred to the sensors. Optical fibres are the most suitable permanent monitoring device for monitoring the strain locally. The study also showed that 3-D photogrammetry using digital image correlation is the most suitable technique for whole-field monitoring, allowing the entire tapestry to be monitored quickly and without direct contact. The two techniques would be used in tandem, the fibre-optic sensors acting as a reference to validate the data from the photogrammetry technique.\n\nThe current proposal is aimed at developing these techniques into a hybrid system which can be used to monitor tapestries in-situ. A post-doctoral researcher will take responsibility for developing the application of the optical fibres, while a PhD student will develop the photogrammetry technique. The major challenge will be to apply the two techniques together so that strain readings from the optical fibres provide calibration for the photogrammetry. The final stage of the project will be to apply the methodology to both a custom-woven tapestry incorporating optical fibres in its structure and to a historic tapestry belonging to one of the project partners, Historic Royal Palaces, English Heritage or the National Trust. The successful result will be a fully operational monitoring system that can be installed unobtrusively in a historic house environment. The optical fibre component will be hidden from view. The photogrammetry equipment will be portable so that it can be introduced for periodic testing and then removed.\n\nThe three investigators, Frances Lennard, Dr Janice Barton and Dr Alan Chambers, will manage the project with Dinah Eastop, Senior Lecturer TCC, and Associate Director of the AHRC Research Centre for Textile Conservation and Textile Studies, the fourth member of the current project team. An advisory panel made up of representatives from the heritage field and other researchers will provide additional support.\n

As a pan-European study of 'Jewish' country houses this is a pioneering research endeavour. We aim to establish 'Jewish' country houses - properties that were owned, built or renewed by Jews - as a focus for research, a site of European memory and a significant aspect of European Jewish heritage and material culture. The central place of the country house in our national heritage landscape speaks to its importance in the construction of nationhood, a phenomenon with parallels in other European countries. Work on Jewish elites too has operated within a nation-state framework, elaborating paradigms that emphasize national distinctiveness. This project will be the first to illuminate the cosmopolitan world of the 'Jewish aristocracy', its relationships, its architecture and its things, showing how this international network reshaped 'Jewish' and 'European' culture and society. 'Jewish' country houses and their owners have escaped systematic study because they do not fit established conceptual frameworks in country house studies or in modern Jewish history. Yet 'Jewish' country houses - often clustered within easy reach of capital cities or near exclusive seaside and spa resorts - were ubiquitous across Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century. Far from seeking to establish a fixed typology of 'Jewish' country houses, we will explore the many variants that proliferated across Europe from the second half of the nineteenth century, and the social, political, cultural and familiar relationships that underpinned them. Individually and collectively, these houses represent the summit and terminus of the growth in Jewish private wealth and Jewish artistic expertise in this era. The project will investigate this phenomenon through two complementary research strands: socio-cultural (focusing on collecting) and socio-political (focusing on philanthropy). Our focus on the social and political role of Jewish elites in the countryside works against the grain of existing work on Jewish elites which has an urban, bourgeois focus. It promises to reshape the way we think about assimilation, acculturation, integration and difference. We also break fresh methodological ground by uniting into a single analytical framework all the actors involved in the creation, maintenance and decoration of the Jewish country house, creating a bridge between social history, architectural history, the material and intellectual histories of collecting, and the history of the art market. Working closely with the National Trust and the European Association for the Preservation and Promotion of Jewish Culture and Heritage, and with relevant properties like Waddesdon Manor and Strawberry Hill House, we will transform practice in the heritage sector by developing an intellectual framework and practical resources that will outlive the project to enable heritage professionals in the UK and continental Europe to better engage the 'Jewishness' of these country houses and their often contested history.