National Trust and University launch HistoryScapes storytelling app to offer ‘time travel experience’ through voices from the past

Three National Trust properties are the focus of an immersive new app that brings their estates’ histories to life through the eyes of ordinary people – thanks to a collaboration with history and heritage experts at the University.

HistoryScapes is a free app that takes users on GPS-triggered trails at National Trust properties to connect people to landscape heritage. Each trail is led by a historical figure and, inspired by research into them, offers a ‘living history’ format to give visitors the sense of having one foot in the past, the other in the present.

Saltram in Devon, Quarry Bank in Cheshire, and Devil’s Punch Bowl in Surrey, have all been featured on the app, and are explored through the eyes of a carpenter, mill worker and broom maker.

HistoryScapes is led by the National Trust’s Historic Environment and Visitor Experience teams, but builds on the work of a team in the University’s Department of Languages, Cultures and Visual Studies, who have created the HistoryCity apps, a series of interactive historical guides to key European cities that can be explored on smartphones.

HistoryScapes’ trail director, Dr David Rosenthal at the University, said: “This has been a tremendous collaboration with the three property teams at the National Trust. Together we’ve created what might be called digital monuments to an element of heritage that is easily overlooked. What we hope is that the combination of the stories, expert commentary and images – many from the properties’ own collections – will connect visitors to these landscapes and histories in a fresh, immediate way.”

At Saltram in Devon, carpenter Henry Stockman navigates both the world of the estate’s hired labourers and the influence of the Parker family that lived there in 1775. Visitors can follow Henry on his walk around the estate as he checks up on his workmen, shares stories of the past, and introduces the people who lived and worked there.

Henry undertook increasingly ambitious projects to create prominent buildings in the garden at Saltram in the 18th century. Unusually, his jobs edge into the design and not just construction, with Henry picking up the plans of amateur and professional designers and making them real.

There are mentions of Henry in Parker family letters and in account books, but perhaps because of the value placed on him by Theresa Parker, we know something of what he looked like. He was the subject of an oil painting by Italian artist Antonio Poggi, and the painting remains in Saltram today. While it is typical to possess only a few documentary traces about 18th century workers, it’s uncommon to find a portrait of a named servant in an English country house. We hear a conversation between Henry and Theresa at The Orangery, and through his voice, the ways in which the Parkers invested in landscape, architecture and art, and the workforce that supported them, during an era of change and growth.

At Quarry Bank in Cheshire, a hive of cotton mill activity by 1823, the challenges faced by its mill workers are voiced by teenage apprentice Frank Scott. At this time, cotton mills were transforming the country, creating new industrial landscapes and ways of working based on the factory system. At 16, Frank Scott has been swept up in these changes.

As one of the poor children sent from England’s workhouses, Frank has a roof over his head at Quarry Bank and is learning a trade – but there’s no pay, the hours are long, and he must remain an apprentice until he’s 21. Unsurprisingly, Frank at times takes a critical view of his life as an unpaid child labourer, and of the mill’s owners.

Today, Frank has a special job, taking a new arrival on a tour of the property and unlike the other two trails on the app, where the visitor is guided by the lead character as themselves, at Quarry Bank the visitor is implicitly asked to step into the shoes of this new child apprentice at the mill. Along the way Frank eavesdrops on a conversation between the mill owner’s wife Hannah Greg and her daughter Ellen as they prepare an improving Sunday sermon for the apprentices and overhears an argument between the owner Samuel Greg and his son Robert.

At Devil’s Punch Bowl in Surrey, George Mayes, a broom squire, or broom maker, takes us around the area in 1925.

Until the mid-19th century, the Devil’s Punch Bowl and its wide tracts of heathland were seen as a forbidding backwater along the London to Portsmouth road. In 1808, Turner sketched it as an ominous landscape overlooked by gallows on Gibbet Hill, named after hangings that took place there, and in the 1820s, the political reformer William Cobbett called it “the most villainous spot God ever made”.

But that wasn’t to last. By George Mayes’ time Hindhead and the Punch Bowl had become firmly established as a place of natural beauty. Increasingly accessible by road and rail, it was a fashionable destination for the middle classes, an escape from the pollution of London – an “English Switzerland”, as one writer put it at the turn of the century.

George is a keeper of animals, a milkman, and a broom maker – a cottage industry now on the decline. He’s lived in the Devil’s Punch Bowl his whole life and he’s witnessed Hindhead become an alluring and accessible destination. Take a walk along the old turnpike with George, and discover a landscape marked by centuries of change.

Each trail has eight stops, hooked to a historic map and triggered by GPS (or by tapping site points off site). At each stop, there is also ‘Discover More’ audio, commentary from National Trust experts that provides context and a view from the present, along with historical images from the Trust’s and other collections. Users can also link from each site to a webpage that offers more information, images and other content.

Shannon Hogan, Archaeologist for the National Trust, said: “There are many documents and archives representing landowners and the wealthy families who created and lived in some of the Trust’s most lavish houses and estates, but far less is known about the people who laboured in these places and kept them going. It is their stories that we are connecting with through HistoryScapes and imagining both their inner thoughts and the conversations they had as part of their day-to-day lives.

“We hope that visitors will enjoy immersing themselves in these stories as they make their way around the estates, following in the footsteps of these fascinating historic characters, learning more about them and their surroundings that survive today.”

HistoryScapes’ project lead, Prof Fabrizio Nevola, Head of Art History and Visual Culture at the University, said: “This collaboration with the National Trust is based on our ongoing research on how well-researched public history can be delivered on smartphones, with a simple yet immersive time-travel experience enabled by this ubiquitous technology.”

The HistoryScapes app is available until the end of 2025. Download the ‘HistoryScapes’ app from your phone store or scan the codes at the relevant properties.