Penny describes her experiences of attending classes at Wensum Lodge and her thoughts on its closure. Penny was a member of the Learners’ Committee.
I was trained as an Environmental Health Officer and I ended up with a lot of caring responsibilities because my husband was brain damaged in a car crash and my son was born autistic. So, I had to keep working but I was always very involved with arts and crafts throughout my life and I decided I needed to do something else. I saw a lovely brochure for Wensum Lodge with pictures, and it would always get you very excited about the next courses. I visited it about 15 years ago and was just overwhelmed how fantastic a facility it was and liked everything about it.
Then I got very addicted to all the number of courses. The manager and his wife ran it beautifully. They had a lot of very committed crafts people teaching and they did a lot on languages and all sorts of things; the whole place had a fantastic buzz around it. When the courses came out, you had to rush to book them because they would be oversubscribed. It was a lovely old site, the building itself fantastically inspirational, near the river and they didn’t only offer local courses but also residential courses. They had a fantastic canteen with really good food and about three employees there I think and in addition they had a ground floor café which was privately run. The café was in a separate building but near the river, and there was Jurnet’s Bar as well. You would be in the café and talk to someone else who was doing a different course. There were a variety of courses including wine tasting, and history courses, sewing and the bit that I liked the most which was the sculpting. I joined a summer sculpture class because one of my hobbies was making miniatures with while my autistic son was around. I wanted to make the faces more realistic. They were only 12th scale, but I just couldn’t get the face right. I was doing Carter discovering Tutankhamun.
Fourteen years at Wensum Lodge
So I went for 14 years! It was then run by Ron Spriggs who was a very enthusiastic teacher. He had all sorts of devices and eventually I did a course with him when we did the skeleton. It had all the muscles and I made a man out of armature. Ron’s background was in a foundry and he had a lot of experience. We made little armatures and covered them with clay or wax. The conversation was great, and the people were all so interested in arts. There were some really good craftsmen there but mainly we were amateurs. As part of our social life we used to go to the pub afterwards, the Ferry Inn on Thursday or Friday evenings. The group actually went abroad together – Paris one time and the Louvre and Rodin’s house. It would have been closed off to me if it hadn’t been for Ron and Wensum Lodge.
We went to Barcelona. It was the right balance, because I was a carer and just to get out and do something with my hands. Also, my work was stressful, and I totally forgot about it when I was working on the clay.
The whole place was so buzzing with arts, with enthusiasm. I would say on the whole most people were older but there was quite a lot of youngsters, and they also did the foundation course for youngsters that were going to art college. So, we mixed with these youngsters as well and they were taught the course. A few of them I must admit were only there because someone said ‘Why don’t you do that’ but there were a few really good enthusiastic people. Quite a few people I think had mental health issues as well and it was so good for them. I recognised a couple who were slightly autistic or found it socially difficult, but they were brilliant artists and just to see them set off on their journey was lovely.
After Ron left I did some courses with Do Phillips who is a wonderful lady who was a fantastic sculptress. She produced a lot of the mannequins or sculptures for the Time and Tide Museum and for SS Great Britain and worked in Japan. She taught in a totally different way which I found very interesting. She measured everything. We did silhouettes with Do. We are literally talking a couple of millimetres that you could be out, but you could know that when you get a life sculpture against the model. You think it is not quite right but can’t see it, so to have the tutelage was better.
I mainly did life sculpture which I’ve always liked doing. I think it’s very interesting. I did portraiture. With Ron we had an advanced group. We used to do these amazing sculptures that needed armature and we’d get a model. It might be a model just stepping forward, so you’d have to capture that stepping forward and how all the muscles worked. Somebody who was supposed to be rock climbing, you’d get them at an angle.
It was a bit sad going back to doing slightly less challenging things with Do but I just loved doing it. I’ve done some of my best work with Do and she’s actually a personal friend now. She’s fantastic and I organised a little trip. Just three of us went to Paris to Camille Claudel’s Museum.
Running down
Everything in my life was just perfect with that and everything was going fine but I could see it was running down instead of being buzzing. They stopped the residential courses. We used to go to Jurnet’s for a meal and a drink afterwards and they stopped doing that. That was a fantastic venue because it used to have musicians coming in, amateur musicians and some professionals.
They ran it for about five years so about ten years ago they closed it off. I did some watercolour courses with Toni Hayden, up to three years ago. I started doing silver smithing but for that I was too impatient, so I went back to sculpting. I liked the malleability of sculpting.
Involved with the committee
I went on to the committee. You could see it, less and less people, less and less courses being run. I could see the economics of it and thought if the County Council are not running it properly, it’s an old building and it will go to rack and ruin and there were lots of things that never worked. Suddenly the basin wouldn’t work and we’d have to troop into another area. Just lots of disrepair and they were quite expensive courses. I used to go in a lot to facilitate because I was very friendly with the tutors and the lovely technicians. They found it difficult, some of the frustrations of working there, particularly the last few years, and just not getting funding, not getting equipment, everything being delayed. So, I felt that I could give a voice to both my fellow students and to the staff. I would say in meetings, ‘The staff have been fantastic could you pass on how much we’re grateful’ and then you’d see them a month later and found they had nothing. They were putting in a lot of effort and came up with very ingenious actions really. For instance, they didn’t separate sculpture and pottery, you could paint a glaze on your sculpture and put it through the firing schedule, put it through the kiln. They didn’t say, ‘Oh no it’s sculpting that way and its pottery there.’
At that time I did some summer schools for the pottery. I did sibori, which was dyeing fabric, a sewing class with Lesley Starswell.
Issues – we fought and fought
A new manager would come and I would always raise things in the meetings which I think were about four a year. The manager was being worn down and I used to say they’d gone to the ‘dark side’ because they were just fighting the County Council for this behemoth of a place. You’d be dealing with one person and suddenly they’d left, so I felt very sorry for the staff and I was thinking this is getting really bad, they’re not getting enough revenue.
Then there were always issues with the car park. The Sports Hall at Wensum Lodge did a deal and they had more car parking spaces, half the site. Then they used to rent out some spaces we couldn’t get parked. Eventually you had to come in about an hour and a half before your class to get parked because there would be someone standing there, and you couldn’t argue. It was just so frustrating. I kept on raising the issues in the meetings. You would have to walk up to Rouen Road, which is quite a distance and particularly if it was only about two-hour parking. People would have to leave early to feed the meters and get a new parking thing.
In about 2013 we got wind of the fact that the new portfolio holder was told that they were getting rid of everything and it would be sold off.
We fought and fought. We tried to find the history of it because we knew somewhere it had been left. We thought it had a convenance on it to stop it being used. The old boat sheds had been converted by the Friends of Wensum Lodge in the 1970s. Suddenly they capitulated but there had been a change of County Council and they had just shelved it. In about 2015 they had these plans out which were ridiculous because they did not involve the tutors. Suddenly an architect would come round and say we’re going to do this, we’re going to open a café. So, our lovely room, which was right by the river side and well-lit, which you need for sculpting, was to be closed. They said, ‘Oh we’ll make that into a café.’ We all protested, and the tutor was left out, Do was left out of the discussions. They started clearing the classrooms. It was so badly organised. ‘Oh we’re going to do a refurbishment, it’s going to cost, we’ve got private funding, we’ve got about £2 million that’s going to go on the site and reinvigorate it.’
Covid and after – the Learners’ Committee
Then Covid hit so then it was closed down. The staff were furloughed. It was very, very frustrating. We used to be in contact with each other a bit by email, but we couldn’t do anything. After about a year we came back in. We had to have face masks on, and handwashing facilities and everything else. Numbers were lower but we kept going and we got through and we all got back. It was so marvellous again, but it felt so quiet on the site. There would be one class on site in the beautiful buildings and nothing happening and then one day … It was the last class before the summer break, so we couldn’t get together. We did quite a bit of campaigning together, like about the car park and Do said, ‘Did you know, they said they’re going to close it’ and I just couldn’t believe it.
I was devastated and I kept on raising it through the Learners’ Committee. I said, ‘Look if you’re not making the revenue and there is a lot of disrepair, it is going to fold, unless you keep the funding going’, but you just couldn’t get an answer from them. I used to get so annoyed because there was one time they had written something vague and obscure in a whole report on safeguarding. They had to present it to the Learners’ Committee. They used about an hour of the meeting just reading through this thing which it didn’t apply. I agree with safeguarding, but the people that were there were older people and it just felt like we were being used. I was quite annoyed because they kept on saying, ‘Oh right well when we meet back, we’ll…’ and ‘Oh well, there’s been no movement on that, but we’ll put it up for the next meeting’ and so things were just deferred the whole time. Things like a broken sink, everything structurally, decision-making and everything and I think probably some of the higher ups knew that there was a discussion going on. I don’t know and I don’t mean to be conspiratorial, but they just weren’t doing anything and then we had a group of us that got together. We did all sorts of things. We contacted the portfolio holder who just fobbed us off.
We got enmeshed in the mechanics of the way the County Council operate. I do realise that we were fighting against them having to deal with very big issues, social care, transport, children but it just felt that we had been completely left out. We had a centre of excellence there for art. Norwich is, by the nature of it, a bit cut off, and we could have made so much out of art. Be it with all these facilities and you had things like the Pottery Throwdown at the time , but it was closing down.
We tried everything
Individually we were doing a lot of contact with the key portfolio holders. I tried everything. The manager above the manager at Wensum Lodge and I was saying, ‘Well look it’s terrible’ and they were just telling us such lies. We met on the steps of City Hall with our placards. We got publicity. We involved the press as much as possible. A couple of councillors were interested. People were signing a petition and if we got 5000 signatures or something they would have to reopen it. The discussion would have to go to the County Council. We believed them but they didn’t expect to get so many. We did a huge amount of publicity on that. I contacted everybody, I put things up online, I did neighbourhood things, we got up to that number and so when it came to the actual meeting, we weren’t allowed to go into the meeting. There were a few of us, I think it was actually the workers that went outside placarding.
At the meeting the portfolio holder said they were really worried about it for health and safety reasons. There are lots of little higgledy piggledy buildings and it’s not fit for purpose. I sent a reply to the Council (health and safety was my job) ‘You are saying it’s not safe now, yet the legislation you are referring to was about 2007 so at what point did it suddenly not become safe? We’ve got lots of people who are disabled. They park in the car park, they wander down. It’s a slight slope. It’s not difficult for access. There’s every help given to people.’ Then one after the other of the councillors said, yes, you could trip. It was not true that so few rooms were being used. Jewellery, silver smithing, pottery and sculpting were going on in there.
The admin was another story. They were reduced down. I was still on the Learners’ Committee, and it obviously totally changed it. They were just selling us. ‘Oh well look it’s not very good for the rest of the county. We’re going to spread all the learning across the county because Norwich is not a good place to hold it.’ Well, Norwich, where Wensum Lodge is, is a perfect place. There were lots of people who came from further across the county. They could get to the train station. It’s a 10-minute walk, so everything they said was just baloney. I could think of some other words, and they just kept on fobbing us off and so I kept on contacting everybody. I suppose it must have closed in Christmas 2023. It was so so tragic, but they said, ‘Oh we’ve got somewhere else we’re going to go. We can’t tell you where it is.’
But they just fobbed us off until we all eventually ran out of steam. It just closed down and that facility is now just rotting away. All the lovely equipment that they’d put the money in and that was just going to rack and ruin. I know that Jurnet’s had got a lot of algae growth because it’s an old building and it was damp and cold. I know at one time the Jewish Museum were interested in taking it on because of the merchant, who was called Jurnet. The building has Grade I listing.
So, we’ve lost a good facility. There’s nothing else been made available. Somebody is doing a private one day a month course down near Beccles, but we used to spend six or eight weeks on one sculpture, and you get it right so just to do it for a few hours. I have joined up with them, but I haven’t gone to the course because it’s very different.
What could have been
At one time just prior to Covid, they drew up architectural plans as well and there was a £2 million investment going to go on which they’d got funds for. One person said, ‘Well I’m afraid they dissipated all the funds, it went to some other projects during Covid and the problem is all the disrepair of the premises’, which I knew was the honest response. They had spent so little on maintenance that it had got to a point where there was going to be a huge spend on it to keep it viable. She was the only one who said honestly that it was that, rather than health and safety grounds and provision across the county. Because what happened during Covid, the courses that could be run from a classroom like the languages were moved over, first of all online I think, then to Charing Cross. They never really came back to the site, and that obviously reduced the income as well., but I always felt there was nobody there pushing it.
People would say, ‘Oh I’d love to do that. Where is it?’ Or ‘Oh I used to do courses there and I loved it,’ but there was no publicity. So, like with Do, eventually through lack of publicity she did her own posters and when our numbers were dwindling, put the posters round the libraries, and then we got lots of people, but that wasn’t her job. We had this girl who had designed this amazing poster. and it was so fantastic and literally like she wanted to be praised for it. I had to say, ‘That’s all very well but where are you going to put these posters because I never see it advertised.’ You don’t have the booklets anymore and it’s really difficult online.
There were loads of problems with the admin. It always was a difficult situation with the admin. It used to be well manned and I don’t know, they had staff there that included one man I remember who used to wear glasses and one time they were talking about staff cutbacks. I wanted to enrol. They said, ‘We’ve got a staff meeting going on.’ I said, ‘Well how long do you think it’s going to go on.’ ‘Oh, probably half an hour.’ I thought I really want to get enrolled, so I’ll stay here. So, I stayed for half an hour. Then it turned into an hour. Then they eventually came in and I said, ‘I’ve been waiting to enrol’ and he said, ‘Oh well we’re going to have cups of tea.’ So off he went. It literally seemed to be that they didn’t think about the learners. We were just dismissed. Not everybody was like that, but it did continue like that.
Another time I was ignored by the same man. I don’t think even he was on a computer, but he was looking at something. I must have been there for about quarter of an hour then I said, ‘I’ve been trying to enrol’ and then he looked up and said, ‘It’s past four o’clock now so I can’t enrol you.’ They just had such peculiar attitudes. I used to say I needed a sherry before I went on the website because it was such a clunky website. You’d go through something, and it would bring up all the committee meetings. It was so difficult to get through. People were being paid in the County Council, and nobody seemed to have any initiative or if they did, I think it was just being squashed. The managers had initiative, but you could see them come back, ‘Yes, no, oh I’m going to raise that’, or ‘I have raised that but I haven’t had an answer on that’, so it really goes to the structure of the County Council I think as well. They do a good job in many respects, but they just seemed to take the path of least resistance.
Penny Coult (b. 1952) talking to WISEArchive on 4th March 2025 in Norwich. © 2025 WISEArchive. All Rights Reserved.
