Watching the House

In 2024, we partnered with Coney, a social arts and change charity, to co-produce an immersive smart phone experience, exploring Marble Hill House’s colonial past.

In spring 2024, we delivered a series of workshops for young people local to Marble Hill House in Richmond.

Marble Hill House is a Georgian villa built in the 1720s for Henrietta Howard. Whilst perhaps best known for her role as mistress to King George II when he was Prince of Wales, Henrietta Howard was an extraordinary woman of her time in her own right, and overcame personal adversity to become an important figure in Georgian court society and a member of a dynamic circle of writers, poets and politicians.

Her building of Marble Hill House was a mark of financial independence from her abusive husband, and a place of solace which she wrote in a letter “promises more happiness for the latter part of my life than I have yet had a prospect of”.

However, some of the money used to build Marble Hill came from investments in the South Sea Company, linked directly to the transatlantic slave trade. Our group of young people were particularly interested in this aspect of Marble’s history: Henrietta securing her freedom through the labour of the unfree. It is not known how aware Henrietta Howard would have been of this in her lifetime.

We also learnt about the history of the mahogany that forms the main staircase within the house. Mahogany is linked to the slave trade; the trees were often felled through enforced labour and ships transporting mahogany cargoes often also participated in the transportation of enslaved people. We also discussed the associations of the triangular trade with commodities like coffee, sugar and tea – all of which were part of the fabric of Henrietta’s everyday life in the 18th century.

You can read more about the history of Marble Hill House here and a full report on the slavery connections of the site here.

We partnered with Coney, a social arts and change charity, for this project and so were aware throughout the workshops that we needed to generate ideas for a smartphone experience that would connect other young people with the site in a new and exciting way.

As part of the workshops, we heard from English Heritage historians and curators, as well as theatre producers and game-makers. We discussed what made immersive smart phone experiences interesting, what sort of experience we had of playing them before, and how the mechanics of game-making worked.

We became particularly interested in the idea of journeys: the journey of Henrietta becoming an independent woman; the journey of the creation of Marble Hill House from the hands of those who felled the wood to those that built it; the journey of visitors to the site and their understanding of it and our own journey in contextualising this impressive historic house.

We wanted other young people to explore the site’s complex history through our smartphone experience, making the lesser-visible histories more visible.

Watching The House

Using our ideas, Coney went away to create a smartphone game over the next couple of months.

By June, Watching The House had been created – an experience which begins introducing you to the site as if you were a room explainer, standing guard and surveying the house as people come and go. The more you observe, the more you realise there are representations of people missing from the walls – we can see Henrietta’s portrait, King George III’s portrait, other rich and noble people’s portraits, but what about the people you don’t see? Who’s not in the room?

The experience encourages you to think about the people in history who have enabled the existence of house’s like Marble, whose labour wasn’t (and isn’t) visibly recognisable but is all around us.

We had a playtest of the game in early June where we able to iron out any issues, and then it was time to begin planning our launch event!

We organised two days across the summer to promote the Watching The House experience which was available and open to all for free.

For our launch event, we had a brilliant oral historian and storyteller, Wendy, bring to life some of the stories and themes Watching the House touched upon. Wendy spoke of the spiritual connections and associations woods like mahogany had for indigenous people and EH historian Megan spoke about the history of Marble and why it’s important we centre new and previously unexplored narratives relating to sites like this.

“I loved getting to learn new and interesting histories. I never would have visited a house like this before and I feel like it’s really opened my eyes. Thank you for such a fun project!”

Youth Participant

Watching the House gallery