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Ten years ago a contemporary arts programme began at the Wordsworth Trust, writes Will Carr. The programme has grown to incorporate three main strands: two writers and one artist currently hold residencies; three contemporary art exhibitions a year are shown; and a poetry reading is held every week for six months during the summer.

This activity is tied up in the soft red ropes of what in many ways is a traditional heritage organisation. Dove Cottage, where Wordsworth and his family lived between 1799 and 1806, has been preserved virtually untouched, and around 75,000 people visit it every year. Nearby is a museum which has a permanent exhibition relating to Wordsworth and his circle and temporary exhibitions on Romantic themes. There is also a library containing a large collection of material relating to English Romanticism, space for education work, a restaurant and guesthouse, and a number of other properties which surround and protect Dove Cottage itself.

There are areas within this context where the contemporary arts programme has to look after itself: funding sources, for example, are not always the same as for museum or education work and different avenues have to be found. The audience for a heritage attraction is generally different from that for contemporary art, and so a new market must be built up. This, given the wild rural location of Grasmere, is especially true for evening events such as poetry readings, as tourists tend only to visit during the day, but careful branding of the programme in relation to the heritage attractions has created a crossover audience. In most areas the contemporary arts programme in fact receives a great deal of support from the organisation in which it is embedded; most of this support derives from the pooling of resources such as staff time and energy and economies of scale. The fact that the supporting organisation is predominantly a heritage one making no difference; specific relationships are generally established when the programme seeks to involve itself in heritage activity.

The way in which the arts programme has been developed attempts to reconcile contemporary art to its surroundings in this way, both literally and intellectually: as the current mission statement of the Wordsworth Trust has it, ?linking the creativity of the past with that of the present?. Employing writers and artists in residence is the most obvious way of doing this, immersing someone working in contemporary arts in the Wordsworthian environment and providing a platform for what is produced. Inviting work from outside, as in the season of poetry readings, has an opposite justification: the programme aims to bring contemporary arts to the Wordsworth Trust in order to enable a re-evaluation of the work it in some sense celebrates, at the home of poetry. The fact that the contemporary arts programme exists within the heritage organisation as a whole is in these terms the reason for its success, in that Wordsworth and Grasmere provide a pattern which contemporary art can shape.

Will Carr is Arts Officer at the Wordsworth Trust. t: 01539 435544; e: w.carr@wordsworth.org.uk