HARLAXTON - short documentary (2019)

what does harlaxton mean to you when i hear the word harlaxton i think of oh boy i think of the manor you know you drive you drive up to it is that this remarkably imposing and beautiful structure i saw that in person like it's not a photoshop kind of situation it that's how it looks realizing that like this is where you're gonna live for four months students can call this magnificent manner home but it's this intense kind of living and learning environment [Music] harson's an international study center for american students in lincolnshire about an hour by train away from london and it's inside a beautiful grade one listed banner house on 300 acres of parkland and woodland for 50 years students from around the world have studied at harlaxton but the manor's history of study abroad goes back much further chat called gregory built it way back in the mid-19th century the why question is an interesting one he was a bachelor so didn't need a house as large as this and so the general consensus is that he built it in a way to show off he was asked why he was building it there's a big country house across the valley called beaver castle which is where the duke of rutland still is and in the 1830s 1840s when this thing's turning up in the locality they send someone over just to inquire why are you doing it and his explanation was i'm doing it because the pursuit of information for this building leads me into all parts of the world and to meet all variety of people again it comes back to that original idea what's motivating this it's travel experience bringing those ideas together and this is the result of one man's study abroad experience in in europe gregory's pursuit for building the manor was unique and the construction of his home echoes the same eccentric values it's a strange building it's not a normal english country house by any means if you're if you're incredibly rich in victorian britain i want a style of architecture that allows me to be big and bold without being confrontational secondly it's the uh romanticism and they want to build styles of architecture that echo past times and have wonderfully eclectic designs but because he travels around europe it makes no sense just as a neo-elizabethan house it's it's in a sense it's a it's an early victorian fantasy which is at its origin designed to look much older it's designed to look like it's an elizabethan or early jacobean building but very quickly the the builder the owner of the original mama decided that that wasn't quite enough and it starts to spread in terms of its sort of architectural conception you can actually start picking up the french influences the baroque influences none of which you would have in a proper neo elizabethan has the ideas the influences become rather grander perhaps than just that elizabethan pastiche another important aspect of a typical english country house during this time is a conservatory but even this is not without some mystery the main sort like the front was 1843 so we between the 1840s and 50s that this was put on what we call the west wing at the building conservatory is one name you can call it an orangery you can call it a living room it's it's five rooms or five different compartments in what we uh classes like a greenhouse but a bigger greenhouse that's attached to the main building whether it was one section and pieces were added on we don't know so a lot of it is investigation works now because we we actually don't know the original designs not only were his ideas and plans for the building perplexing in this era of england the intrigue of gregory gregory has still not diminished today where he traveled we don't know for sure because there's no letters there's no diaries there's no documentation it's almost like he's been robbed out of history but fortunately he stuck his name on the front of the building so that kind of was his request [Music] there's an interesting history as to what happened to the house after he died because in those days a property automatically went to your nearest surviving male relative now he didn't have a male relative he didn't have a son he apparently had a distant cousin a relative who was also his lawyer after the death of gregory's lawyer the manor and its grounds were passed to a man named john william sherwin the manor remained in his family until the first world war you have the first world war you get people coming back from the first world war there's a whole series of problems post first world war one there's massive debts that have to be paid off so there's lots of taxation which makes it expensive to run a place like this in addition you've got a lot of problems with servants these places only work with big armies of servants after the first world war if you've served in the trenches you're not necessarily keen to carry someone the breakfast of a morning so consequently in the 20s and 30s a lot of houses like this are being demolished because they don't serve a function anymore the the cultural and political function of building a house like this doesn't apply after the first world war harlaxton served no social or political purpose and fell into disrepair and then eventually in the 30s it was put up for demolition and the house was under threat in those days houses like this had become sort of white elephants we call them there was a millionaires by the name of violet vander else self-made millionaire multi-millionaire lost all her money in multiple legal cases but for a while she owned it invested in it and cared for it violet van de elst maintained the manner in the 1930s and 40s but the consequences of the second world war only made it that much more difficult to upkeep you then hit the second world war and you amplify the same problems so come the end of the second world war no one's going to be a servant that that world of servants and masters and country houses that's gone at the same time you've now got even more debts and higher taxation because you fought a second world war again you end to a period of well what do you do with a place like this it has to have a purpose once again facing demolition harlaxton needed to find a new benefactor after world war ii the society of jesus the jesuits established a seminary here and so the first people to sort of use it as a residential kind of home were the jesuits the jesuits maintained harlaxton up until 1965 when the manor was leased by stanford university when stanford came they came and the great hall was full of pews and that was their classroom first stanford and then evansville recognized that it's a great house it's near london it's got great transportation links you can go to airports you can get to london you can get on the trains you can do what you need to do as a study abroad platform and so they decided to invest in it and that's the repurposing of harlest and there's a study abroad platform stanford brought students to the manor until 1969 when the university of evansville took over stanford's lease it was a president president wallace graves he was looking for a different way to do education and international education specifically and this place they found it in an ad in a magazine actually up for lease they said well let's go take a look at this place they took over the lease from stanford and that was 1969 as i say and these first class here was here already in 1971 which means they moved incredibly fast i'm told they were kind of worried we're going to send these kids all the way over to england we're not really quite sure how night you know is the hot water going to work is the electricity going to work what's it like there's they wondered you know are they going to come back and go what did you send us off to was horrible but that wasn't the case at all i mean this house embraced them and they embraced the house just like we do today and it's been consistent since 1971 almost 50 years yeah in over 50 years if you take the the stanford students into account apart from evansville many other universities send their students to harlaxton well we have relationships with the many different schools a lot of them around evansville wabash college is one for example which is in indiana they send some students here every year and some faculty western kentucky kentucky's another baker's another texas lutheran university wisconsin eau claire these are sort of regular contributors those happen through relationship building right and sometimes students just you know find us and come and then they go home and they tell their faculty they say we really need to go to harlaxton and things evolve and we develop new relationships and nurture the ones we have around 100 to 150 students study abroad at harlaxton each semester additionally faculty from the different universities visiting harlaxton teach at the manor and often bring their families along too we have four british faculty here who are on site year round and then three four or five from the university of evansville about three four or five from other schools who are our partners but it also expands the horizons of the the faculty members i think to be immersed in this kind of environment and harlaxton always invites the visiting faculty members to find ways to integrate what they're teaching with the local community here and i think they've found different ways for example we take students to will store manor to visit isaac newton's family farm i know the nursing students do a lot of visits to hospice facilities and to other healthcare facilities so especially for programs like engineering where i teach it's important to have faculty members from engineering because that helps students in engineering study abroad and still stay on track to graduate although students come from a variety of different backgrounds and majors they are all required to take one common course british studies is quite a long standing course now and it was introduced initially to try and give students a common experience an academic experience while they were over here and obviously to introduce them to the broad sort of historical and cultural markers in the history of the nation in british studies students learn about the history of the nation they are now calling home they learn about the uk from roman occupation all the way up to modern day and for a long time its main theme has been national identity what has contributed to britain's identity historically in cultural political terms and what does it mean to be british in the present in addition to classroom lessons british studies also takes students on field trips to see different parts of the uk such as lincoln cathedral and southwell workhouse because everyone here has to take it so every single student has to take british studies so it becomes a kind of collective experience and sometimes that's being stressed and moaning about the exams and term papers and all the work that there is but it still remains that kind of core that the students are able to sit in on and participate and to get a really good grounding for the place that they're calling home at the moment it does become something that everyone has in common and that glues the group together usually i suppose as well we're not just interested in students sort of being able to recite a load of dates and know a number of sort of early medieval kings or something like that but it's designed to be an interdisciplinary course and we hope that students from a variety of backgrounds can you know perhaps use this information in different sorts of ways and that it provides them with sort of transferable skills and i also see like you know students who wouldn't otherwise have met each other in life so someone who's doing nursing at one university might meet somebody who's doing engineering at another university and those people wouldn't have met each other if they hadn't willingly signed up to do british studies together so i was a student here in the spring semester of 2017 and i chose to do it then because i went on like an inter-term trip when i was a freshman we went to amsterdam with my advisor and we were there for like 10 days and then i really enjoyed it and i thought that was all i wanted to do like just 10 days was enough i didn't ever think i could last a semester abroad but then my advisor really pushed me and he's like oh you can do it i was really passionate about going to a different place in england because i didn't want to be around a bunch of americans and i didn't want to have to deal with all that and i wanted a true british school experience but then my mom pointed out that i wouldn't be able to travel on the weekends ever and i wouldn't be able to see anywhere else it would just be sort of going to real school and not really having a break from anything and after she pointed that out i sort of was like okay you know what i should take this semester and i can get to know my classmates better then and also it'll still be different because i'm not amongst just my little bubble there are a lot of other people and there are people from other schools as well so i came from wku right and there were only eight students from our institution that came to harlaxton and i only knew two of them so in most the students here come from the university of evansville so like once i got here a lot of people had already formed these connections and bonds and they knew where they wanted to go with people but i was in like a completely different boat even though it was a little bit stressful at times like figuring out who was a really good travel group and who i had the most fun with and stuff like that once i found that group it was really rewarding apart from classes students are also given the opportunity to travel across europe i've been to five countries it's between 11 and 13. so i went to 14 when i was a student i italy was like the one that i want to go back to the most and then sweden was like also my favorite my mom's side of the family is swedish and so it was really cool to be over there and i also went on a solo trip and it was my first like big solo trip and that was really cool because i was kind of like i can do anything now so i really will always associate that with sweden and i think switzerland was my favorite because whenever i traveled there for a long weekend we rented a car which i think that made it so much more fun because i haven't had that all semester so it was like the little taste of freedom that i have back home that i didn't have here and then also we got to see all the swiss alps as we were driving which was incredible like it was so picturesque and i did not think i would be able to do that this semester the best time that i had was in portugal because that's where we did the habitat for humanity build and then also greece i feel like you could spend so much time in greece and i'm going back there in december and i suppose i particularly like the field trip to lincoln that we do the cathedral there i always both like to show it to students but i usually find something a bit new myself when i go there favorite thing that i've done is go on the lake district trip with the students and then i got to go along side the students when they went guild scrambling like hiking up one of the waterfalls and i just got to see them do that and have the best time and i felt like a total mom because that was like the first moment i was like oh you guys can do this i'll take photos and i was like perfectly happy with doing that so i expected my classes to be the biggest thing that kept me busy it's really been the independent travel that i've been able to do that's kept me busy taking a weekend trip from friday to sunday since we don't have classes on friday it takes so much more energy than i expected at the beginning because in the united states if i want to go somewhere i get to drive but here it's like public transit and booking tickets and making sure all your logistics are planned out once i got the hang of it it was a lot more manageable and then you were able to enjoy things at a different level than you were at the beginning i think that's part of the the juggling process for both faculty and students is that we work hard so that we can spend that time to get really immersed in an environment it'd be awful to for example go to florence and spend all of my time grading in the hotel room when i can go to see the galleries and the museums there but harlaxton is meant to sort of be a place where you are focusing on traveling and becoming a real person and becoming a person who has more experiences than just education there is so much value in going to really hard classes but there's also so much value in just taking time away from that so at the beginning um i had a strategy that i would finish all my schoolwork before i like went on a trip and it worked really well but sometimes there's just not enough time in the day or in the week to finish school work between monday through thursday i ended up like working on some of the schoolwork like on my trips if i had free time do some reading on flights and trains and stuff like that so really understanding that you have to be flexible with certain situations and then like being okay with having to do that because not everything goes as planned especially this semester when things do not go according to plan students learn to adapt well i got really lost when i went to norway in the mountains and i realized that sometimes you have to prepare more than you want to and sometimes you're just gonna mess up i think that that was a moment where i finally realized that i was not invincible and after that i was just a lot calmer about a lot of other things too i had a big expectation coming in that like communication was going to be a lot easier than it turned out to be so whenever i went on all these travels like it was difficult to keep in contact with people at home and like update my parents that like i'm safe and i'm okay because i'm a 19 year old girl like traveling europe essentially by myself or with other peers learning to just be at peace with it and like sit maybe sending a text in the morning be like hey i'm doing this today i'll text you when i can like i'll check in and let you know everything's okay but other than that you're not going to hear from me and everything's going to be fine so like finding a way to create peace within not being in control of it and that's been like a really applicable skill into many different things in my life students have so much freedom during their semester and experience significant growth but when things get tough the student development office is there with guidance seo has been my favorite part of this experience all together and studying abroad because it's really cool to have adults when you're just off traveling everywhere and seeing these new things you can always come back to people and just be like this is what i did this week and here's some crazy stuff and they're like listen here's some nonsense that a student pulled like four years ago and you just get to share those stories with them and these are people who are here for you no matter what but they're also just like they've been through it all no matter how far they travel students will always have their home harlaxton to come back to what we hear back from students is i was really worried i'd never been abroad for example i don't know anybody going on the program right am i going to get along with my roommate am i going to get lost all these worries people can have and then at the end they say i've never made so many friends so fast the fantastic thing about harlax and the reason that i keep coming back is that i see new things about the manner at the same time i see new things about students and see new things about myself but that first few days people are just in awe and if you take a look at their eyes and they're just experiencing all of the nooks and the crannies the whole house is for everyone for all the students everything you see is a student space i think the students venerate those spaces and respect them in pretty profound ways students and sometimes visiting faculty they they inevitably they see their semester as how things must always be and so some things stay the same and of course the building broadly speaking remains the same but you know other colleagues have changed considerably it's also not a sort of gradual evolution every semester has its own characteristics and has its own sort of environment and students sort of recreate a place and make it their own and then they're gone after 15 weeks and it becomes somewhere different but because everyone is living and working together in the same house students and staff it does have this real sense of being one big community all together all kind of experiencing similar things which i think is is quite unique if you think about a student going to college in the 70s in the states compared to a student going to college in 2019 there's probably very different reasons and motivations and dynamics getting you to college compared to say 40 years ago but you're still getting students coming to harvest them because it still serves a very useful function in getting people overseas and giving them the opportunity not to completely change the way they see the world but at least see a bit of the world and get some perspective that's what we do give you the opportunity so you come a little bit nervous right that first trip it always feels like people are really nervous about just getting here and i try to tell the students they say i know that was a really big step but that's actually just the first step by the end you know it's like oh it's easy to get you take a bus then you got to do that they're going off on adventures you can't even quite believe by the end i would guess if you go all the way back to 71 there's these bonds that people form with each other at harlaxton they bond with the house the house is spectacular it's an amazing thing but it's really about how the people connect and we're i mean we're very intentional about that because we think sort of success in the classroom success in all these other growth opportunities comes from i don't know what it is about harlaxton i mean it's a very affirming place right i mean when i say you can dance as if no one's watching i do mean it right and sing as if no one's listening i do mean it because that's how we treat each other there's no sort of shame in trying something right it's very it's a very affirming place lets you venture out gives you that confidence [Music] [Music] do [Music] you

Channel: Brea Mullen

Views: 2,483

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Id: uOqo7xjMNCQ

Length: 24min 18sec (1458 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 10 2023