Heritage is a notoriously competitive field, so, with the support of the National Lottery Heritage Fund we created a paid internship at Beckford’s Tower. The successful applicant Joe Baker kindly shared his thoughts about his time working on the “Our Tower” project:
“When I initially applied for an internship at Beckford’s Tower back in January of 2023, I was struggling to find my footing within heritage. Finishing my postgraduate degree three months previously, I had not anticipated the sheer amount of competition there seemed to be in an industry notoriously not well paid. After graduating I knew that a career in heritage is what I wanted to pursue, but that was quite a broad statement to make knowing the wide ranging types of roles the industry offers – I wanted to experience it all!
After months and months of unsuccessful interviews and unanswered emails, I stumbled across an internship at Beckford’s Tower on their National Lottery Heritage Fund project Our Tower: Reconnecting Beckford’s Tower and Landscape for all – this was the best thing that could have happened to me. Since starting at the project in March 2023, this role has been inspiring and incredibly rewarding. I have learnt so much not only about working in heritage, but also about myself and what I hope to achieve in the future. This would have never been possible without the wisdom and selfless support I received from the project team as well as everyone involved at Bath Preservation Trust.
The Towering Ambitions of the Project
During my interview, the project team outlined to me the purpose of their ongoing project at the Tower. Alongside the need for extensive structural repairs of the building, the team was seeking to reinterpret the history of the Tower’s previous owner and creator William Beckford. As one of the richest men during the Georgian period, Beckford has been historically remembered as a celebrated author, an ardent collector of fine art and books, as well as the conceiver of two widely celebrated buildings – Fonthill Abbey and Beckford’s Tower.
However, the project sought to highlight a key aspect of this history that had been largely uninvestigated, that William Beckford’s vast wealth was funded directly from his ownership of sugar plantations and thousands of enslaved people on the island of Jamaica. Consequently, the project struck me as forward-thinking, necessary, and committed to confronting the history of the Tower to hopefully make the building inclusive and accessible for a wider audience. This introduced to me for the first time what a career in heritage can achieve when its goals have such a positive social application. From then on I was hooked.
More than coffee and tea!
After somehow getting the position I was unsure what to expect; would I become the stereotypical intern forever fetching coffee and tea like you see in films and TV? My fears were quickly quelled when on my first day I was part of an interview panel hiring a company to develop AR/VR interpretation for the Museum! Not only did this show me some of the inventive and creative ways the project was trying to improve their visitor offer, but it demonstrated how the internship was going to work – I was going to be able to get involved in lots of parts of the project.
That was certainly the case. Learning on the job I was able to get stuck in many different aspects of the project. This ranged from cataloguing and documenting some of the Museum’s archives and collections, writing and creating object handling sessions for visitors to get involved in, helping make leaflets and social media posts advertising the project, and even planning and running an event for the local Ensleigh community! I managed to experience so much incredible and satisfying work in such a short period of time, which was something I really savoured.
However, as a history buff, one of the most rewarding pieces of work I was able to lead on was producing my own piece of Museum interpretation that will be displayed in the Tower! Working with the Senior Curator Dr Amy Frost and the team at Zubr Curio we were able to produce an animated film depicting William Beckford and his family’s historic involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. Through months of painstaking research and planning we were able to collate records of their plantation ownership on Jamaica over four generations; through this we were able to produce a film which accurately represents how their ownership of plantations directly increased their wealth, as well as impacted the lives of countless enslaved people. I am incredibly grateful to have been involved in such a positive and hopefully impactful piece of work that hopefully aids the Museum’s aim to embed the source of William Beckford’s wealth into the story the Tower will tell to its visitors.
People make places
Not only was it the work which I loved about the internship, but it was also the people I met and was able to work alongside. The close-knit project team was so welcoming and generous with their time to help support me through the process. I learnt so much not only from their guidance but also through the responsibility and freedom I was given to develop my skills, which has really aided my confidence in my own abilities. The wider team at Bath Preservation Trust team could not have been more accommodating and lovely to work beside; to meet a group of people so dedicated to bettering their local community through education, heritage and campaigning was greatly inspiring.
I am so excited for the public to visit the Tower once it reopens this summer and see all of the hard work that has gone into creating an engaging and innovative museum space. I feel so grateful for the experiences I have been able to have over the past year, and the chance to work for a project dedicated to displaying the Tower’s history to make it accessible and accommodating for everyone. I for one cannot wait to see what they have planned for the future!”