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Local Authorities in Britain are perhaps not among places one might imagine finding a culture of innovation. Yet this paper is concerned with innovative management practice in Staffordshire County Council, taking as a case study recent changes in one of the Council’s most unusual services: a visitor attraction. Shugborough Estate is on a 99-year lease to the County Council from the National Trust, but costs the taxpayer annually. It comprises a 900-acre estate of mansion house, gardens, an 19th century model farm, the servants’ quarters and a walled garden. New management at the head of the County Council, from the private sector, identified Shugborough as one of the elements in need of change. Managing this change demanded the co-operation of the National Trust; the Council members themselves; the Earl (who lives in part of the house), the villagers (living in villages which were ‘moved’ by the Earl’s ancestors) and not least the long-serving County Council employees at the estate. The Council’s aim was to make the estate commercially viable, without compromising its intrinsic qualities.

This paper takes one aspect of the change at Shugborough as a means of illustrating the practicalities of culture change: the decision to adopt first-person guiding techniques. This was taken against the background of (a) drawing the various elements of the estate together so that they were not ‘competing’ for audience; (b) presenting the entirety as a model of an nineteenth-century estate (the buildings, from mill to mansion house, are virtually unchanged since 1805) and (c) presenting the estate as from the perspective of the nineteenth century. At this micro level issues which flow from macro-level management change can be well analyzed and discussed, and their outcomes assessed.

Stream: Change

Paper: Changing the Historic Visitor Attraction of Shugborough (UK)

Trained as a field archaeologist and excavated and published a series of major urban archaeological sites in York (UK) before moving to attractions management. First major project was the redevelopment of the Jorvik Viking Centre in York (UK) which was in need of a major revitalization to revive flagging visitor numbers. Moved then to run visitor side of Castle Howard (Yorkshire, UK), before becoming General Manager at Shugborough (Staffordshire, UK).