A virtual bath

Yesterday I had an interesting visit to Kings College London, to attend a workshop in the fascinating space of the university’s Anatomy Museum. I wanted to lie on the floor below the massive skylight, in the position where once a cadaver on a table would have been, while students watched the opening of the body from the mezzanine that extended along three sides. But that’s not what you do, when you are meeting people for the first time, so I sipped my coffee and shook hands instead.

We were there to discuss a neighbor of Kings College on the Strand, surely one of the least known National Trust places in the country. The Roman Bath on Strand Lane is open only by appointment on Wednesday afternoon, but thousands of people must pass every day, hardly glimpsing the signs of its presence. Kings has put a little bit of money into exploring how better access to this (and other) hidden heritage might be achieved digitally.

Martin Blazeby kicked proceedings off by sharing a computer model of the space. Then Alex Butterworth who’s done a bunch of digital storytelling, and Valeria Vitale spoke about two similar (and indeed interrelated during research) concepts The Idea of Water, and A Web of Unexpected Connections. On the two, The Idea of Water most excited me – I could imagine it being installed inside the Roman Bath (which if you want you can peer at through a window when its closed) silently projecting the content (a bubbling source of quotes about water, in essence) on darkened walls controlled somehow by the people doing the peering, or by other virtual visitors in the comfort of their own home, or for than matter, by people walking across Waterloo Bridge…

In between those two concepts Marcia Balisciano of Benjamin Franklin House, shared the frustration of some her her visitors at finding the most (mostly) empty and unfurnished, and we knocked about a few ideas about using digital technology to give those visitors a little of what they wanted, while preserving the interpretive philosophy behind the house itself.


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I came to cultural heritage via five years working at Midland Bank when I left school. In my free time, I volunteered as a costumed interpreter at Kentwell Hall and, with re-enactment societies, at various medieval sites around the UK and France. When, one evening, a few of us said “we could make a business out of this” I left my job at the bank to go to college, first to get an Art Foundation and then to Manchester Polytechnic to join an innovative course called Design for Communications Media. I specialised in Educational Media Design, with the intention of applying what I was learning to cultural heritage. During my vacations and upon graduation I worked for the nascent company my friends had started, Past Pleasures, creating immersive living history festivals at Lancaster and Tunbridge Wells, as well as projects including: an exhibition for the centenary of the Commonwealth Institute; a design for a metafictional Sherlock Holmes exhibition in Croydon; and, a game that combined real-time investment advice from 300 year-old characters at the Bank of England Museum with a digital simulation, tracking the players’ investment portfolio from the founding of the bank to its tercentenary. In 1996 I helped found JMD&Co, and for two years I also lectured on Heritage Tourism and Visitor Management and Interpretation modules for a Portsmouth University validated HND/degree course at Farnborough Technical College. Subsequently, I enrolled in the new Distance Learning delivered Masters’ degree in Museum Studies at Leicester University, where I became interested in the social use of space, particularly Bill Hillier’s “space syntax,” and the increasing futility of cultural heritage sites trying to tell doggedly linear stories in three-dimensional spaces. Although my dissertation explored models for mapping interpretation, and particularly learning styles, onto spaces, a satisfactory reconciliation of linear story and three-dimensional space eluded me. After graduation, I decided my time in the “small business” end of cultural heritage was over for a while, and I left JMD&Co to join a cultural institution, the National Trust, as a Regional Community, Learning and Volunteering Manager. I brought the first National Trust iPad into use at Batemans, where, combined with a wax cylinder record player, and the help of renowned folk singer, Jon Boden, we’ve returned Rudyard Kipling’s voice back into his old home. However, one of the innovations which I am most proud of is the National Trust’s virtual tours. Working with a small company, and a range of disabled stakeholders, we created a touch-screen based human computer interface that could also, if required, be controlled with other input devices, and allowed visitors with a variety of disabilities to fully enjoy the virtual tour. The teams’ achievement was recognised with a Jodi Award for Excellence in accessible digital media in 2008.

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