1st March represents the start of a new financial year for National Trust and 2014/15 year is sure to be a busy and exciting one at Mottisfont & New Forest. Construction work will start on our new visitor facility, which involves the shop moving to the front of the property and a new cafe in the stable yard, as well as new toilets and visitor reception at the front, where the existing reception hut is situated.
The "StoryScape" interpretation project will finish this year too. This is a very exciting project which will see new rooms in the house open to the public for the first time (the maids' rooms) and the lower corridor interpret our medieval heritage properly, amongst 20 other points of interpretation across the property.
We're going to start fundraising for a new "Walled Garden" and have a busy schedule of work in the New Forest, delivering HLS objectives and our new HLF project.
All very exciting and certain to keep us all very busy indeed. The year started as well as the last one finished from a visitor perspective, with over 3,500 visiting last weekend, as the sun came out and the popular Litchfield exhibition drew the crowds.
The house looks great now it is fully open again after the winter closure for cleaning:
The Chionodoxa are starting to come out under the Lime walk too....not too visible from this shot, but they are there, I assure you!
This week I had the pleasure of visiting Osterley for a visitor experience meeting:
How we interpret our properties at the trust is key to our visitors' experience and there are some spectacularly good examples of great work for us all all to learn from. I was particularly impressed by the Packwood case study and hope that ours will look equally impressive post the new visitor facility and StoryScape development projects. I've made a note to visit when I'm next in Warwickshire.
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