A MASTER plan funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund entitled Reimagining Wordsworth is being developed by the Wordsworth Trust, to improve the visitor experience at Dove Cottage and Town End, writes JANE RENOUF.

The trust’s director, Michael McGregor and curator Jeff Cowton, gave a pre-planning presentation of the various options to Lakes Parish Council. They include the sensitive conversion of some existing buildings including the tea room and bistro into a central point where newly arrived visitors can learn about Wordsworth.

The tea room would be relocated to the present shop site, and the shop would move inside the museum. Other proposals include a new, fully accessible sensory garden, the restoration and new planting of fruit trees in the old orchard and a new building on the site of an old wash house which once stood by Dove Cottage.

In common with other historic attractions, visitor numbers at Dove Cottage have dropped from 85,000 in the 1990s to 50,000.

To help recover interest in Wordsworth, the trust considers that visitors should be able to navigate through the site more easily, while being given a greater understanding of who Wordsworth was, and life in his time.

Wordsworth is no longer taught widely in schools and many visitors approaching Town End know very little about him, or which areas of the site to visit.

The proposed changes will provide space where visitors will be introduced to the poet and his life before they visit Dove Cottage, using the present Dove Cottage Tea Room building as a potential learning space to welcome visitors, also providing somewhere to leave bags and coats, have a cup of tea and be introduced to Wordsworth’s life.

Dove Cottage would remain at the heart of the visitor experience but the trust also plans to make better use of existing space by re-purposing some of the nearby buildings, including an old wood store, as well as the new building on the old wash house site.

Costume characters around Town End would provide living history to help people step back in time to Wordsworth’s time, and the museum would be re-planned thematically rather than chronologically to tell his story.

Visitors would also explore the relevance of his poetry to society today and understand why poetry today matters.

The trust said that such an uplifting experience could also benefit health and wellbeing, helping people to feel better about themselves and the world.

Plans are also afoot to develop a nearby strip of land owned by the trust as a woodland trail, providing space for people to let off steam and express themselves.

Reimagining Wordsworth is a site-wide strategy also designed to look outwards from Town End and into the wider community by connecting the trust and Dove Cottage with Grasmere and the local community.

The trust said the master plan, still in its first phase, aimed to give visitors a better quality experience, though unlikely to cause a big increase in visitor numbers, but councillors thought otherwise and predicted visitor numbers would rise considerably, with thought needed about parking provision.