Young Producer Residential 2025

Each year, our group of Young Producers have the opportunity to attend a residential which enables them to connect with one another, learn from one another and learn more about the sector. This year, we had the residential in Cambridge and enjoyed a pretty packed few days!

On Saturday morning, we started with a trip to prehistoric flint mine and EH site Grimes Graves, where the group had a flint-handling session with ‘Memma the Cavewoman’, discussing the power of outdoor heritage and its impact on wellbeing. We got to see flint-knapping in action and touched extremely old axe heads and a 2 million year old stone!

We had a tour of Grimes, including into one of the excavated pits led by EH historian and prehistoric expert, Jennifer.

We then headed straight to Cambridge University Library for a behind-the-scenes look at the current ‘Curious Cures: Medicine in the Medieval World’ exhibition, where we met with Katherine Chandler, who spoke about her journey from working at English Heritage to joining Cambridge University Library as the new Exhibitions Coordinator.

Katherine’s currently designing an exhibition based on Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, and we got to hear about all of the processes involved.

We also met with Chris Burgess, the Head of Exhibitions and Public Programmes, who chatted about the end-to-end process of conceptualising public programming and community co-curation on the upcoming Black British Voices exhibition.

We then had a chance to design our own mini exhibitions using materials that would likely be stored in a library archive like Cambridge’s as inspiration – one group came up with ‘Glasto Buried’, the hidden history of festivals and enjoying music, which suggested the idea of using old sheet music but making them more contemporary and vice versa (for instance a live performance of Taylor Swift hits but on a lute and fiddle!). Another group came up with an exhibition idea titled ‘The History of Sleep’, looking at how beds have changed over time.

Katherine showing us round the Library

Hearing Chris talk about his role and what's coming up

Walking tour around historic Cambridge with Jonny

On Sunday we visited EH site Audley End House and Gardens and began the day with a session run by Young Producer Guruleen, who shared her experience getting creative writing commissions for historic sites. We then spent the rest of the day with Peter Moore, Curator of Audley End, who began by sharing his journey into curating.

Peter’s talk gave particular focus and insight into his curatorial decision-making – how to create a cohesive and engaging narrative for visitors within the house, what opportunities there are for future research and other histories to be told…

Peter discussed Native American material culture and how Audley End came to have a deerskin shirt from the 1700s in its collection, and what the challenges (and benefits) are of showcasing items like this. We had some really thoughtful discussions around curatorship and the ethics of how you present collections, and how we can shape historical narratives.

We ended the resi with some reflection time before heading back to Cambridge station to say goodbye!