The Missing Case of C. Winifred Harley

How might writing practices be diversified to address historical silences and reimagine lost interiors? My proposal addresses this question in response to the ‘Imagining the unseen’ theme. To do this, I will present an extract of my research on the architecture of progressive education at Dartington Hall School in Devon, England (1926-87). The internationally celebrated co-educational boarding school initially boasted some of the most modern and specialised educational architecture in the country. Until now, however, historians have not focused on its designed environments, many of which are lost or forgotten.

I will share the story of C. Winifred Harley, a pioneering but overlooked early years educator who was employed by Dartington to advise on the design of its first purpose-built educational facility. To restore Harley’s agency in the design process – as well as to understand the interiors – I offer a creative, layered writing approach which places the marginalised voices of neglected staff or forgotten students alongside the traditionally more dominant ones of headmaster or architect. The method, drawn from site-writing practices and archival research, is a response to Dartington’s own innovations in the field of performance writing and explores an embodied relationship with place and space.

Through the work, I argue that polyvocal forms of writing are a vital mechanism for generating more diverse and holistic understandings of interiors and the communities that use them. On one hand, a greater breadth of academic writing styles creates opportunities for readers to engage with texts who may otherwise be shut out. On the other, the approach reflects the progressive desire to develop the whole learner through interactive and expressive forms of education. The approach has important implications for making built environment practices more inclusive by prompting designers and policymakers to recentre marginalised voices and foster multiple ways of knowing.