Heritage
Forg’et dragging a reluctant child around a museum. We’re in the long gallery at Sudbury Hall, a 17th-century country house in Derbyshire known for its lavish Jacobean interiors, and. a small army of pre-schoolers is running up and down chasing a troop of push-along toys. Downstairs, the building’s former kitchen is full of children shaping blobs of clay into slightly smaller blobs, while a neon sign in the saloon invites young visitors to ‘party like it’s 1699’. Sudbury has become the National Trust’s Children’s Country House; a radical reworking of the stately home that pitches it as a kind of grandiose Wendy House. Rather than simply being