CHESTER: Attic Nursery or Tent Room

In 2013 I went on holiday to Dorset with my folks, and visited Kingston Lacey. The attic tent rooms made a big impression on my imagination.

One of them was used as a nursery, and the other was the room for a batchelor who wanted to be reminded of his archeological digs in Egypt. 

So I decided that I would recreate a similar tent room in the roof space above my chapel, as an old nursery with toys and pictures that would reflect my childhood, but also to house mementoes of my life as a touring actor, moving around the world as if pitching tent again and again. I have called the room Chester, after the Latin word for a military camp, castra, from which we get place name endings like Leicester, Lancaster, or Colchester. 

Here is the constructed room before pictures and decor are finished. The floor is plywood, scored to look like floorboards and each stained separately. 

The walls are made of card covered with cotton, and lined with beading and cereal packet skirting board, painted to resemble the original in Kingston Lacey. The fireplace and bed are white metal kits I have decorated. The mattress is made of packaging foam covered with material to match the walls.

The window has stained glass depicting Biblical stories that have resonated with me since childhood: the Good Samaritan, St Christopher, Abraham and Isaac, David and Goliath, David and Jonathan, and St George and the dragon. I copied the images from a 1930s window in St Peter-Manfred Church in Norwich. 

As a child I loved half-timbered buildings even more than castles, so I thought it would be appropriate for the nursery to have a half-timbered face. The beams are mostly lolly pop sticks with cardboard plaster between. Here it is under construction.

 

Why?

Why am I doing this? Not many people I have met are trying to build their own miniature stately home or castle, and I am often asked what I will do with it once it's finished. I usually say it will never be finished! But it leaves the question, what's the point of it all?

I think I make it precisely because no one else I know is doing a similar thing. As a professional performer, many of my creative skills are being used in my job day to day. But all my creativity at work is taken up with interpreting text written by others, and changing my own identity. This is creatively satisfying in some ways. 

But I still need a creative outlet within which I can be original. Within singing, acting, even composing music or poetry, I am limited by the norms used to judge those art forms. But by creating within a genre I feel no one else is using in the same way, I feel I can be more originally creative. Model building in the way I am attempting it allows me scope to express who I am, whereas my profession allows me creatively to interpret other people's work or identities. 

To build a model to scale faithfully is one creative task in itself. But this is not my aim. By building this miniature castle, I am attempting to express my own identity. 

Therefore the rooms are not models of real rooms, nor even just fantasy interior decoration. Each room is an expression of an aspect of myself. Each room is, in effect, a poem in miniature interior design - the decor, and choice and placement of art works and furniture specifically designed to encapsulate or reflect a period or aspect of my life, via the things that are important to me: history, art, philosophy, religion, furniture, antiques, scale, and ultimately, experience of life. 

This is 'art' at its most unashamedly self-indulgent! This 'art,' if it can be called so, is only for my enjoyment, for my expression. I welcome others to view and hopefully to appreciate it. But it's only potential social value is to inspire and challenge others to express themselves just as individualistically.

I have a fantasy that I could leave it when I die, finished, to the National Trust, and that they would display it in one of their houses, perhaps one which has inspired this castle itself, like Kinightshayes, Kingston Lacey or Knole. But I am also aware that some of the miniature paintings I create might be copyrighted, making displaying my castle a logistical problem. The first step however is finishing it...