National Trust’s two-year project to secure the future of A la Ronde, Devon, is now complete

The two-year project ‘A la Ronde – Conserving the Past, Creating the Future’ is now complete.

Designed to reimagine A la Ronde and engage new audiences, the project has included partnerships with local community groups, significant conservation work, the development of exciting digital offers and virtual tours, creation of work experience placements for students, and the delivery of new experiences and events for visitors.

Brand new spaces have opened, including a hands-on ‘Room of Discovery’, a space designed for co-creation with the local community, and a programme of rolling exhibitions in a dedicated space so there is something new for people to see with every visit.

The ‘Room of Discovery’ is an immersive re-interpretation of A la Ronde’s historic Shell Gallery, offering visitors a sense of the original space, which is too fragile to enter. The Room of Discovery has been created so that visitors can still explore the same natural materials and crafting techniques employed over 200 years ago, whilst making sure the historic Shell Gallery is protected. Positioned on the lower ground floor, the room is fully accessible, and is part of the permanent visitor route, ensuring visitors will be able to see (and explore, through touch!) the patterns, shapes and materials up close.

For visitors who use British Sign Language, a series of accessible videos have just been launched at the property. The videos are designed to make A la Ronde more accessible to more people, so have interpretation, captions, and a voiceover. There are 5 short videos to enjoy, which can be viewed by scanning QR codes at the property with a phone camera. The videos can also be viewed from home here.

The project has hosted a wide variety of talks, workshops and events. At our Summer Festival in July, special talks with researchers, artists and volunteers were on offer to visitors, as well as nature sessions learning about feathers and rivers, live music and crafting with felt and natural materials. The project has reached out to local people, schools, families and community groups to join us in celebrating nature by bringing willow sculptures to life, with the final sculptures taking pride of place in our meadow.

For the first time since the National Trust took A la Ronde into its care in 1991, significant conservation work has been completed in the historic Shell Gallery and Grotto Staircase, which was featured in the BBC Series ‘Hidden Treasures of the National Trust’ in May 2024 and can be viewed here. The conservation work inspired a ‘Symposium’ – a conference at the University of Exeter – where our findings were shared with 160 attendees from 7x universities both in-person and online.

A key part of the project is our ‘Compendium’, a newly created digital space - a collection of stories to delight and surprise. We have created a central place where in-depth information about the house, the grounds, the people who lived there and behind the scenes action can be found. Whether for local residents, visitors or specialist audiences, from school groups to online only visitors, our users can explore A la Ronde, its history, conservation, people and community connections on a deeper level of detail than ever before.

The project has also enabled a new high-definition virtual tour of the Shell Gallery and Grotto Staircase following conservation, providing more detail and more information than ever before. Visitors to this new virtual tour can explore two different types of tour – either history or conservation – and look at the space from new perspectives, for the first time ever.

The new Shell Gallery Virtual 360 Tour can be found here:https://storage.viewit360.co.uk/national-trust/a-la-ronde-24/

Emma Mee, Project Manager at A la Ronde, says: “We're delighted to have successfully completed this two-year project. We’re enormously grateful for the support we have received from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, from the Wolfson Foundation, and from visitors and donors, whose generosity has made this transformative work possible. We would like to thank everyone who has taken part in the project, from visitors to students, to families, staff and partners, over the past two years. We hope that through our work, A la Ronde has become better known to more people – that sharing the stories of the house in a variety of ways will bring in new audiences, and in doing so protect A la Ronde’s legacy for many more years to come.” 

This project has been enabled thanks to generous funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Wolfson Foundation, and the National Trust Central Conservation Fund, in addition to the kind support of visitors and volunteers. The project began in July 2022 and culminated in summer 2024.

A la Ronde is open every Tuesday to Sunday from 10:30am to 5:30pm until 3rd November 2024. Normal admission applies, free entry for members. Find out more at https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/devon/a-la-ronde