Wellbeing at Wrest

We worked with Chums, a charity which provides mental health support to young people and carers in Bedfordshire, to explore emotional wellbeing through the history of Wrest Park.

Inspired by the impact of heritage on wellbeing, we wanted to look at the presentation of mental health throughout time and see how Wrest Park has been viewed through the centuries as a place that promotes spiritual and mental wellness and how it acted as a place of relaxation and refuge.

We looked at four different phases of Wrest’s history across our four visits:

  • Its time under the ownership of Jemima Yorke, 2nd Marchionness Grey (1722-1797), who described great affection for Wrest in her letters and designed much of the landscaping of Wrest’s gardens.
  • Thomas Philip, 2nd Earl de Grey (1781-1859), an amateur architect who designed and rebuilt Wrest as the French style mansion we know it to be today.
  • Wrest as a First World War hospital for convalescent soldiers from 1914-1916.
  • Wrest Park today and how heritage sites are viewed in contemporary times.

For our first session, we learnt about the Chinese Wallpaper Room and the popularity of chinoiserie in the 17th and 18th centuries. By the late 1600s, hand-painted Chinese wallpapers had begun to get popular amongst the nobility – no pattern is repeated in each pictorial scene which provides a snapshot into Chinese life and the attention to detail is incredible.

We practiced some slow looking exercises, noticing what our eyes were drawn to and why. We thought about why people would have wanted to decorate their houses in this way, and how creating spaces which reflects our interests makes us feel (thinking about our own bedrooms). We discussed the ‘bringing in’ of the outside world into the home, and realised that it made us feel calmer, and that we particularly liked the pictures of the birds and flowers on the wallpaper.

When we had considered the impact of a space like this on our mood, and how we were feeling, we went on to create our own collage wallpaper with Nancy, an artist facilitator. This was really mindful – we listened to calming music and worked together to create a new piece of art.

In the Chinese wallpaper room

Drawing patterns and art inspired by the Chinese wallpaper

In our second session were explored the gardens of Wrest – hearing extracts of the letters Jemima had written about how they made her feel, and how it provided such inspiration for her and her friends.

We worked with a creative writing facilitator, Katie, who themselves had also been a young person supported by Chums, to write our own letters about our feelings and how people outside in nature makes us feel.

Jemima wrote in 1749: ‘It was really a grievous sort of thing to leave Wrest in this delightful Season. You ask if it is in Beauty? Nothing can surpass it. the Ground cover’d with the richest verdure, the Trees the most flourishing, the Flowers the most fragrant, & the birds the most harmonious that you can imagine. Now form the Idea of it.”

Creative writing in the grounds of Wrest

Writing letters

In our third session, we worked with social arts and change charity, Coney, to learn about the process of games-making.

We heard about the lives of the World War One soldiers who recovered from their injuries here at Wrest between 1914-1916, and how (unusually for the time) a programme of recreational activity was devised to ensure that as well as physically recovering, the soldiers were able to emotionally recover as much as possible too.

We considered how play makes us feel, why we love it and how it deepens our connections to one another.

We ended up creating our own games across the site of Wrest in groups, for us all to have a go at!

Finally, in our last session we took part in a Taskmaster activity, meaning we could further explore the parts of Wrest we hadn’t spent much time in, and could learn and uncover some secrets!

We reflected on our journey throughout the project and how we’d used lots of different creative mediums – art, poetry, play, games, to explore our feelings in a space like Wrest.

We were sad the project had come to an end!