Tania Talks Museums with Lee Prosser
Curator of Historic Buildings, Historic Royal Palaces, England
Lee Prosser is curator of historic buildings at Historic Royal Palaces, an independent charity that looks after the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, the Banqueting House, Kensington Palace, Kew Palace and Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland. I met Lee at Attingham Summer School in 2009. In 2011, he visited Savannah to give two lectures at Telfair Museums—one about Historic Royal Palaces, and one about his research on English staircases as context for the Owens-Thomas House staircase. We spoke via zoom on a Sunday afternoon in July.
Tania Sammons
Good to see you Lee! Let’s jump right in. Tell me how you got into museums and why you love them?
Lee Prosser
I've always been interested in museums. I remember the day it happened when I was seven years old in school. I was a pretty ordinary kid. I wouldn't say I had very many interests. One day the teacher brought in a book about Tutankhamun. There was just something about that which really captured my imagination. I can still remember that we had a lesson before break time, and when all the kids ran out to the playground I stayed behind because I wanted to go and have a look at the book. After that it was just a love affair with history and archeology. From that day on I told my parents, “I want to be an archeologist.” That burning ambition never really left me. So I did. I ended up as an archeologist.
Tania Sammons
I loved King Tut too. I'm sure he was a cultural phenomenon at that point. I think there was a major exhibition in or around 1976.
Lee Prosser
1972. [Note: We were both right. Treasures of Tutankhamun first appeared at the British Museum in 1972, and later traveled to six cities in the U.S. between 1976-79 as discussed in this Humanities article.] It had an enduring legacy. It’s like folk memory now. I don't know if it went around the world, but it came to London in ’72, and millions of people saw it. What really struck me about the book is that my memory is so vivid. What I found most interesting was a photograph of the king’s sandals, his shoes. They were made of reeds. I remember thinking, “how has that survived?” “How could something so ephemeral survive?” Years later I went to the Egyptian Museum with a friend. I said, “there's something here I have to find. We went past all these great, golden treasures until I got to a case, and there was the pair of sandals that I'd seen in the book 30 years before. For me, that was a real moment of circularity. That's where it all began. Something so humble sparked the mind of a child.
Tania Sammons
That's awesome. Did you get to see the 1972 King Tut exhibition?
Lee Prosser
I was about five. I was far too young, and wouldn't have remembered it anyway. But years afterwards I went to the British Museum in the late 70s with my parents. I asked them if we could go to the British Museum? They said, “we'll go there for an hour.” We were there all day because I was wrapped by it. I remember the shop had all sorts of King Tut stuff, which must have been a legacy of the exhibition. I spent all my money on books and postcards and things like that. For a lot of people the King Tutankhamun exhibition sparked the imagination about history. It set the world ablaze, and a small part rubbed off on me.
Tania Sammons
How old were you when you went to the British Museum?
Lee Prosser
I was about 11 or 12, I think.
Tania Sammons
The strongest memory of King Tut for me was from around that age as well. I would go to our local public library, deep in the Appalachian mountains. I would ride my bike there. We had a very nice library in Wise, Virginia. I remember reading a fictional children's book about King Tut. I was also absorbing the King Tut vibe. I guess there were references on TV. I wasn’t getting it from my parents, because they weren’t interested in that sort of thing.
Lee Prosser
Without the kind of background that would have predisposed you towards the career you have now comes right back round to the idea that you had to have more of an insatiable curiosity about the world. I feel that's where I was different as well. We’re curious people.
Tania Sammons
We are! What did you study in college?
Lee Prosser
I studied archeology at university with a secondary major of Victorian studies. Quite a contrast, really, but they ticked boxes that I liked. I wasn't interested in Victorian era literature, but I liked popular culture, architecture and art. I studied things like the Pre-Raphaelites and Victorian fairy painting and weird things like that. We had really good modules at college where we could study these very odd subjects like Victorian death and Victorian pubs.
Tania Sammons
That sounds fantastic.
Lee Prosser
I never went into conventional archeology. I went abroad to work (Japan), and came back and to get my PhD. I specialized in landscape archeology. My current career would never have been on the horizon, except that when I finally went into archeology as a profession I started studying buildings as an archeological site. “Upstanding archeology” they called it—looking to diagnose and understand the layering of buildings. That's taken me down the road that's brought me to where I am today, which is looking after some great royal palaces.
Tania Sammons
I guess that would be what we would call “preservation” in America.
Lee Prosser
It's hard to reconcile the idea of preservation versus what we would call conservation. You've got this idea of restoration, which is taking a building back to a certain period, restoring lost things, and preservation is somewhere maybe in between, and conservation, which is respecting every layer of a building's history and keeping things as they are. But it's never quite that straightforward.
Tania Sammons
Yes, I think it’s the same here. How did your interest transfer to buildings?
Lee Prosser
I started off looking at buildings where people would want to convert a barn into a house. I would record the barn before it was altered, and everything was hidden behind new walls. Sometimes that work would lead to modifications in the building’s converted plan. The experience gave me a really wide knowledge of all kinds of buildings. I worked on TB hospitals, barns, former churches, industrial buildings and gunpowder mills. Everything you can think of—all varieties and types of buildings. That was fantastic. It really played into the kind of curiosity my mind craved. I think this kind of vocational profession, unless you are insatiably curious, will never work.
Tania Sammons
Did you study that kind of work when you were in school?
Lee Prosser
Landscape archeology looks at elements of the environment, like the shape of villages. People often ask, “Where can I go and read up about what you do?” But there is no book or manual. The only way you can acquire this knowledge is by going out and studying buildings and getting information from people who are already further along. I had a mentor who I used to go out with and who would teach me. I do the same thing now with other people. People ask: “how do you know that's an 18th century door?” And I say, “because I've seen 5,000 of them.” It's the only way.
Tania Sammons
I've always had an interest in space and how spaces work. I love to walk around historic sites with someone who has studied historic preservation or is an architect who's interested in historic places. At Attingham I wanted to be in your group at every site visit because of the way you processed and thought about space, as well as your general knowledge.
Lee Prosser
Space is important. I like the idea of seeing the evolution of interior design and interior decor. That's something we see coming through when we look at, say, 16th century buildings in England. I'm not talking about palaces, but the houses of ordinary people. You see how social and economic change is reflected in the way people live, the way they use space, and the way they decorate their houses. That change comes through the physical manifestation in the house. Not just the material culture, but how the houses evolve in their architecture as well.
Tania Sammons
Do you call yourself an architectural historian?
Lee Prosser
There is a big difference between what I do, which is what I call a buildings archeologist, and architectural historians who look at form, design and style. I'm diving much deeper into a building. I'm not disparaging their profession. Architectural history is a traditional discipline, whereas buildings archeology gets into the nuts and bolts of a building.
Tania Sammons
How does all that translate into museums like Historic Royal Palaces, or other museums where you have worked?
Lee Prosser
It’s the only museum I've worked for. I've worked for them for 21 years. I like to think about Historic Royal Palaces as a kind of hybrid between a museum and a historic house and a gallery. It's not strictly a museum because there's a continuing relevance and life in the buildings. We're not just a venue to display old things or art. We're not still royal residences, but we’re different from “dead museums.” Rather, we’re something that's passed into history. The way we work is that we have some colleagues who work purely on exhibitions, others who work purely on the historic building fabric who repair and prepare the building for exhibitions, and then there's curatorial, which is at the center of it all. Somehow our museum exhibitions mesh with the way the building appears. It's more than just painting the walls to put pictures on them. It's about reinstating some historic truth to the building to act as a backdrop for those things that we're displaying.
Tania Sammons
The term “dead museum” is jarring.
Lee Prosser
That's for want of a better word. I don't think museums are dead. No, I absolutely don't think so. They're very relevant components of society. What I mean is that you have some historic houses, for example, that are full of collections, and the family that lived in them has gone, and what you're left with is a kind of static display of a building that maybe represents the last incarnation of the family, maybe the 1920s when they were last in residence. But the family has gone. The house is no longer lived in, and it passes into a kind of limbo. For me it’s still a very interesting place. It is a museum, but in a different way than a building that is devoted to being a museum, rather than being a building that has been co-opted into being a museum. A modern museum will rotate its exhibitions. It will have all kinds of creative approaches that's more difficult in a historic house that is a static display. You're not going to rotate the paintings. You're not going to move the furniture out of a room to put on a snazzy exhibition. Many historic houses do that now in spaces that are unused, and that's fantastic. But the word “dead,” I take it back.
Tania Sammons
I know what you mean, but can you give an example?
Lee Prosser
I look after Kew Palace, for example, in the Royal Botanic Gardens, which is the house where George III was kept when he was insane. We restored that house in 2006 as closely as possible to the way that it would have been in 1804 when the king was kept there in isolation. Now that we've done that, you think “what next”? We reinstated the historic interiors. We brought in the pictures, the furniture, and it's a beautifully presented historic house, but what do you do next? Do you just leave it for 50 years? Or do you try and find some further relevance or some further flexibility in the house? And that's the difficulty with historic houses. Do you know what I mean?
Tania Sammons
Yes. One of the things that I really liked about working at Telfair Museums was the variety of spaces—you had the historic Owens-Thomas House, an early 19th century historic house, the Telfair Academy, which became a museum in the late 19th century and had its own historical relevance, but also galleries, and then the Jepson Center, which was specifically designed to host changing exhibitions. I had the opportunity to explore historic topics in gallery spaces that accentuated the presentation at the Owens-Thomas House, in addition to curating art exhibitions. I loved it all. You mentioned that your curatorial team sits at the center of the work. Would you explain what you mean by that?
Lee Prosser
It's mostly based on knowledge. We research. No one else has the opportunity to do it because they're busy with other things. We also bring the expertise to visit archives, and make networks with other organizations. Over time we become a deep well of knowledge, which you need if you're going to bring forward ideas about what to do for the next five years. In terms of temporary exhibitions, you need to have that wellspring of knowledge to be able to promote the ideas to your colleagues who are in the public engagement side of things. They come with a certain amount of knowledge, but not with the nuancing and not with the depth that you have. If someone is repairing the building, for example, they’ll want to know what element they're working on has significance, or is particularly sensitive or rare. They rely on the curators to help identify what's important, and to help build a strategy for repairs. We also serve as a knowledge base to go on speaking tours, to lecture, to visit conferences, to give papers, and to raise the profile of the organization as a research institute in its own right.
Tania Sammons
Switching gears, will you tell me about some projects that have been especially meaningful to you?
Lee Prosser
My most fulfilling project was the Great Pagoda, located in Kew Gardens. It opened to the public in 2018.
The Great Pagoda had never been open to the public, and was terribly neglected. I used to go look at it and would listen to visitors who had walked a long way to see it. They’d be profoundly disappointed when they got there because it was tatty. I advocated for years for the project. I feel very proud that I was a major contributor.
The whole scope of that project was really interesting because it was a new learning curve. I mean, how many people get to work on a European Chinese style pagoda in their lives?! No one, because there aren’t any! This is the one. Well, one of the few anyway. We made great networks with other colleagues in Europe who look after the ones in Germany and Belgium. There are few pagodas there. The research led us to come to terms with the European views of China and led to an understanding of the world in a different light. Looking at the relationship between Britain and China while also thinking about the era before colonialism, for example, when the relationship was more about mutual respect than exploitation. Another one would have to be the Royal Kitchens at Kew. I don't think I've ever worked on a boring project.
Tania Sammons
I love to listen to you talk about your work because you are so passionate. Do you ever have existential feelings about what you do, in terms of how your work fits into the world in comparison to people who are doctors or trying to solve problems like climate change and stuff like that?
Lee Prosser
No. I think you have to live in a society where you give credence to all things. You have to have art. You have to have those that make human existence worthwhile. I'm working on projects that are looking at how the royal palaces are going to be resilient against future climate change or climate instability. Is this a worthwhile thing to be doing? Yes. I feel it somewhere deep in my soul. It interests me so much that it overwhelms any sense that it's not a worthwhile thing to do. It's like any vocation, you just feel the inner passion about a subject that defies logic.
Tania Sammons
What about the stair book? Is that book still alive?
Lee Prosser
I am still measuring and looking at staircases and gathering the information. I think that book will happen. It's been derailed to the long term. There are emails, and other projects, and suddenly you have to attend to something very quickly. Even with the best will in the world, the type of work that we do, it invariably takes a lot longer than you anticipate.
Tania Sammons
What about museums? What are your favorites, exclusive of where you work?
Lee Prosser
I love all the big museums of course. The British Museum has the most phenomenal collection. The Metropolitan in New York, the V&A, and the great museums in Europe as well. The most impressive museum I've ever been to, the one that absolutely blew my mind was the Vasa Museum in Stockholm, Sweden, with the wonderful, preserved 17th century ship. It’s so impressive and evocative. The story was told in such a wonderful way, looking at all different aspects of life. Everything I liked about museums was there. The Vasa Museum is definitely up there. It's one that I would go back to again and again. I like smaller museums as well. And little house museums. Of course I love the Sir John Soane Museum. Some of those other little house museums struggle to survive financially, but are lovely, places like the Leighton House and the Linley Sambourne House in London. They are both charming, but run on a shoestring budget. I really, really enjoy visiting those and talking with the people who clearly love working there.
Tania Sammons
I love all those museums too, and the Vasa Museum is on my bucket list. Thank you for sharing Lee!
Lee Prosser
You’re welcome. It’s been fun talking museums with you!
Thank you for reading Tania Talks Museums! If you have made it this far, you are rewarded with this video of Steve Martin singing “King Tut” on SNL in 1978! He also experienced Tutmania!