Name: Behind the Scenes at Brodsworth Hall and Gardens
Uploaded: 2025-10-17T18:18:51.000Z
Duration: 5 min 40 s
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A lot of people assume that gardeners switch off in the wintertime, that there's not as much work to do, but

Adverbs of manner

actually this is our time to do preparation work for the upcoming season.

Our amazing volunteers have been working very hard, painting benches, doing dry stone walling, mulching beds, edging off areas.

Our fantastic garden team have been doing 24,000 bedding plants in the flower garden.

We've also worked on Restor the summer house mound, which has been a major project for us.

So with that, we basically was using a map from the 1880s and we could see on that map there was a missing path and steps leading to the left hand side of the summer house.

Working with archaeologists, working with properties curators, we came up with a plan to restore that path.

We've planted a fantastic Mediterranean planting scheme.

The garden is designed as an Italianate style.

The summer house itself has Tuscan style columns.

So actually adding that Mediterranean planting in there reflects not just the structure of the building, but

what the garden was originally designed for as well.

The winter is our busiest time here at the house closes to the public from the beginning of November to Easter, and

The roller shutters date from the building of Brodsworth hall in 1860s, and

the family had them put in primarily for security for when they weren't in residence.

And English Heritage actually used them for exactly the same purposes in order to do regular maintenance to the roller shutters in the drawing room.

So we have to take down the pelmets which sit above the windows and cover the shutter mechanism.

We try to minimise the amount of times that do it because the pelmets themselves are really fragile.

They're gilt wood and composition and they're silk with tassels and pom poms.

So we need to minimise the number of times that we lift them up and down.

We do it with a team of between six and eight people and a tower scaffold.

Every element of the pelmet is disassembled and passed down the scaffold and then mounted on a specially made frame so it can be supported when it's on the ground.

We have five pelmets in this room, all fixed normally at the top of the windows to be a visual decorative addition to the room.

And all of the pelmets were put in when the house was built in 1863, installed by the firm of Lapworth, the London company who were responsible for decorating and furnishing almost all of the interiors of Brodsworth.

What's really nice during the winter period when we have these pelmets off the walls for their conservation work, is the discoveries that we find on them that ordinarily we don't see and the public can't see.

For example, in this pelmet here, behind all of the gilt and all the decoration on the top, there are lots of what we would now call graffiti.

But it's actually really exciting graffiti as it's a list of names, joiners and carpenters who worked on the pell mitts about a decade after they were first installed.

Get your country house ready for the summer season.

But it's a really nice example of finding some of the hidden stories about the people who work to help keep Broadsworth running that we normally just don't know anything about.

And they're all local men, they all come from Doncaster.

And they were the people who effectively knew how take the pelmets down, how to put them back up.

So really, really a key part of keeping Broadsworth going and keeping it looking its best.

So we clean every single showroom from the ceiling down to the floor.

We build scaffold inside so we can do high level cleaning.

We clean all the way down to the carpets which we lift, we flip over and we clean all of the contents.

it's also an opportunity for us to make a close inspection of every single one of the thousands of objects we, that that we've got on display.

We try to remove as much dust as possible because dust, as well as looking horrible, is hygroscopic, so it attracts moisture, which then can promote corrosion.

And also it can be a food source for insect pests.

We do sometimes do wet cleaning when there's quite a lot of ingrained dust.

We will also do very gentle wet cleaning on some of the internal skin sculpture.

We also use things like smoke sponges, which is a latex rubber, which again does very, very gentle dust removal of things like paper, recipe books.

One of the types of textiles that we have at vast quantities is the linens that the family would have used.

So bed sheets, tablecloths, pillowcases, we still have hundreds of those on display, but

So we're really lucky that we've got some textile volunteers who will work their way through gently cleaning all those linens and refolding them, making sure that they're well supported whilst they're on display.