Tangible and Intangible Heritage: Charles Paget Wade and the Creation of Snowshill Manor as a Magical Space

Abstract

abstract:How, as heritage professionals, historians, and curators might we approach the hidden, the occluded, the ineffable, the intangible, and the forgotten? How can we use those ideas, narratives, and experiences to unlock the objects, collections, spaces, buildings, gardens, parklands, and landscapes we care for, and thereby create new means by which individuals and communities can connect with them in ways that go beyond the visual? How can we offer encounters that go beyond what Laurajane Smith has called “Authorised Heritage Discourse” (AHD)? This discourse, according to Smith, not only privileges the aesthetic and scientific value of heritage while masking the important cultural and political work that the heritage process does, but also overlooks its less tangible and more ephemeral aspects. One heritage property that pays attention to the less obvious aspects of heritage is Snowshill Manor in Gloucestershire, in the care of the National Trust.