The Red House in Aldeburgh

Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears stated explicitly that they did not want their home, the Red House in Aldeburgh, to be a museum after their deaths. What did they mean?

The Library, commissioned by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears and built in 1963, was designed as a study, and as a space for rehearsal and entertaining. Photo by Philip Vile, copyright Britten Pears ArtsSource.

The Red House, the historic home of the composer Benjamin Britten and his partner the tenor Peter Pears, is in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, about a mile inland from the town’s shingle beach. Britten and Pears, their relationship already nearly 20 years old at this time, moved here in 1957, and spent the rest of their lives here: Britten died in 1976 and Pears 10 years later. It is now run as a heritage site by Britten Pears Arts, a charity descended from those that the two men founded.

When they died, the arrangements set up by their wills saw the house used as a base for their charity, and as accommodation for staff, performers and members of their circle. Unusually, there was no clear-out after the two men died: the house is still full of domestic possessions that survived because they were still being used. This means that we can present the house in ways that are a little different from the normal heritage house: almost as an immersive experience, as if the two men still live here and had just popped out to the shops, as one visitor commented recently.

Paradoxically, they stated explicitly that they did not want the house to be a museum after their deaths. We justify our apparent departure from those wishes by balancing those against the need to inspire participants: if their work in music is to be carried on as they grow more distant, people need to know who they were and why their objectives still matter; and allowing them to visit the house as a heritage attraction is a key first step in this.

We also need to think about what it was that they were actually saying – when they said they did not want a museum, what did they mean? What they had in mind, we think, was the old-fashioned caricature of a museum: a place where things are presented in cases and labelled, where the atmosphere is hushed and studious, where everything is static, and the life is sucked out of it (a caricature, of course!). We need to present the house as fluid and changing, as something still living; so as well as preserving the contents of the house, we need to preserve something much more intangible, the life around those objects, the clutter and the layers of association that are part of a living space.

The house has several distinct spaces with different regimes. In addition to the Red House itself, in what used to be agricultural buildings across the yard there is Britten’s composition studio, and the two men’s library. Outside these preserved spaces we have a gallery housing display items in cases, and an archive, both of which function as more orthodox heritage spaces.

In the house and the library there is minimal labelling, since Britten and Pears themselves would of course not have had labels in their home, and the spaces are presented very much as the men would have known them. Volunteers are present partly to invigilate, and at the entrance to establish the ground rules of the house – that visitors are asked to wear overshoes if the weather is wet and not to lean on furniture – and to answer questions and relay information without labels or captions.

The house is full of material, with surfaces cluttered with objects and cupboards crammed (most of these are not visible to the visitor unless a volunteer opens one to show the contents). A light-touch conservation regime means that the house still smells like a home, with the mingled scents of carpet dust, leather from suitcases and so forth having a subconscious effect.

The one piece of captioning in the house comes right at the start in the entrance hall, where labels explain a 1968 portrait of Britten and Pears. The two men are painted on a bench in front of Snape Maltings, originally with Pears’ arm around Britten’s shoulder. Britten, after years in which their relationship was illegal, was uncomfortable with this openness and the arm was painted over, although it leaves an obvious trace in the picture. The painting summarises the semi-secret nature of the two men’s relationship and now primes the visitor for the rest of the visit to the house.

The composition studio is laid out mostly as Britten would have used it. Visitors remain at one end, behind a rope, where there is a display of photographs and explanatory text, and buttons that activate recordings of Britten’s music. Although this is closer to the orthodox museum experience than the main house, the fact that the visitor is here alone and uninvigilated (except by closed-circuit TV and alarms) means that the visit can be an intimate and emotionally immediate one.

The visitor experience is a multi-layered one. What is visible to the naked eye may be supplemented by information from an invigilator (factual information from the binder they carry with them, such as details of an artwork; anecdote and conversation; or, in some cases, a glimpse into the cupboards). Within the library, conversation with the invigilator may flesh out how each book may encode associations and relationships (and have ownership inscriptions or presentation letters). Further layers come from the display in the museum gallery across the yard, from information in the archive where talks about items from the collection are given several times a day, or from articles (such as the regular Archive Treasures series) on the Red House website. For each visitor the experience will be slightly different and made up of the interaction of these different elements.

In addition, there will be the knowledge of Britten, Pears and their music that the visitor may bring with them: their experience is made of the interaction of all these layers with this cultural substrate that they bring. Of course, we can not count on detailed knowledge in advance. A clear idea about Britten and his music is not a given; in contrast with, for instance, the parsonage at Haworth, where most visitors will have a clear idea of Wuthering Heights, even if this comes from film, or Kate Bush, rather than the book itself. Communicating the flavour of a composer in a short time is not easy: music takes time to play, and one can not ask the visitor to listen to entire operas as preparation for their visit. Some context can be provided via the audio guides in the gallery space, but one can not demand that visitors listen even to these short excerpts.

For music, the different spaces around the site offer different opportunities and challenges. As mentioned, the Composition Studio combines a heritage space with music in a way that reflects its original use. In contrast, the house typically did not have music in it in their time so is presented as silent. However, visitors do indicate that they expect to hear music in it and have given good feedback when performers have worked there, so there is some tension between authenticity and communication. The library was always used for rehearsal, and we are working on how to introduce music here without being intrusive.

The two men’s personal relationship and the story of love in the face of societal disapproval, by contrast, are things to which everyone can relate: these are central to how we present the site. Interestingly, when the house was first opened to the public there was some caution among trustees and volunteers about discussing the two men’s private lives, on the grounds that they themselves had kept them private. However, Britten himself had urged his literary executor to ‘tell the truth about me and Peter’ when he was dead, so the prominence of their relationship is sanctioned. There is also clear feedback from supporters and visitors that this is what they want.

The domestic objects, to those who remember the two men’s era, also communicate a direct and visceral shock of recognition. A recent visitor tweeted: ‘It’s wonderful. We thought it was like your grandparents’ house had your grandparents been two of the 20th century’s most important musicians, and both men.’

Our task, then, is to spark a reaction, an intangible relationship, between visitor and location. We do this by talking about another relationship, that of Britten and Pears, and the two men’s relationship with the house, the possessions left there, and the social circle that visited it. The house and its contents are the jump-off point for the creation of this intangible atmosphere, and it is that which we have somehow to create and preserve.

Just as the things we try to preserve are fleeting and intangible, so in a sense is how we work: practice will keep on evolving and one thing of which we can be sure is that the visitor experience in the future will not be quite the same, but will evolve as Britten and Pears’ time recedes and, for example, the objects in the house are no longer the stuff of personal experience. The house, and how we present it, will adapt as we try to generate the same atmosphere in different times: a Red Queen’s Race in which one runs in order to stay in the same place. Britten and Pears, of course, did not want it to be what they called a museum, a dry and fixed environment, so we feel confident that this changing and dynamic approach would meet with their approval.

This article originally appeared as ‘Preserving the intangible at the Red House’ in the Institute of Historic Building Conservation’s (IHBC’s) Context 175, published in March 2023. It was written by Christopher Hilton, head of archive and library at Britten Pears Arts. Previously he worked at London Metropolitan Archives and the Wellcome Library.