Historic properties and their surrounding environments face urgent challenges from climate change, alongside a persistent diversity deficit rooted in perceptions that they represent only empire and exploitation. Without diminishing these histories, the Historic Houses Global Crossroads project demonstrates how historic sites can be re-imagined as global crossroads: dynamic, entangled spaces shaped by diplomatic, material and intercultural exchange. Moving beyond methodological nationalism and a narrow focus on elite family ownership, the project foregrounds global interconnections between people, environments, material culture and ideas.
The research centres on two of Northern Ireland’s most globally significant yet under-analysed heritage sites: Clandeboye Estate, which holds exceptionally extensive but largely unstudied archives and material collections, and Mount Stewart, one of the National Trust’s most interculturally rich properties. The project addresses the pressing social challenge of ensuring that such sites function as transformative spaces of inclusion rather than division. This work is particularly significant within Northern Ireland’s contested political landscape, where historic houses are embedded in legacies of empire, internal colonialism, and sectarian conflict. By profoundly deepening and broadening understanding of both sites, the project reveals for the first time the complex, textured flows of global interconnection they embody.
Immersive Digital Experiences
Visitors will be able to explore historic houses through a series of immersive digital experiences that reveal how people, objects, sounds, and places are connected across time and space. These experiences will encourage curiosity, movement, and discovery, inviting visitors to engage with heritage in ways that are exploratory rather than prescriptive.
Selected historic objects will be presented in a 3D virtual exhibition, allowing visitors to examine them closely and from multiple angles. Soundscapes recorded on site will capture the distinctive character of each location, from natural environments and wildlife to moments of social life and cultural activity. Interactive site walks will guide visitors through the estates themselves, using location-based audio to unlock stories as they move through buildings and landscapes.
The Network Map
At the centre of the digital experience will be an interactive Network Map developed by the Digital Humanities Institute. This map will allow visitors to trace connections between two historic estates, Mount Stewart and Clandeboye, and a wide range of related places, objects, photographs, and sound recordings. Each house will appear as a central point on a globe-based map, with visual links extending outward to show relationships across the world.
Visitors will be able to select individual connections to open images, listen to soundscapes, or explore 3D models directly within the map. Filters and layers will allow different perspectives to emerge, such as connections based on time period, provenance, or thematic groupings. Rather than following a single narrative, visitors will be free to chart their own paths through the material, uncovering networks of influence and exchange as they go.
The Network Map will be designed to be intuitive and engaging for general audiences, while also supporting deeper exploration for researchers and students through linked contextual information and interpretive data. Together, these tools will allow visitors to experience historic houses as dynamic, interconnected spaces, shaped by global relationships that continue to resonate today.
Project Website
Project Team
- Prof. Joy Porter – Project Lead (University of Birmingham)
- Prof. Olwen Purdue – Project Co-Lead (Queen’s University Belfast)
- Prof. Charles Prior – Project Co-Lead (University of Birmingham)
- Rachel Brady – Project Co-Lead (National Trust)
- Dr. Maitrii Aung-Thwin – Project Co-Lead (National University of Singapore)
- Prof. Annie Tindley – Project Co-Lead (Newcastle University)
- Dr. Emma Reisz – Project Co-Lead (Queen’s University Belfast)
- Prof. Mark McGowan – Project Co-Lead (University of Toronto)
- Dr. Briony Widdis – Research & Innovation Associate (Queen’s University Belfast)
- Dr. Gloria Amaris – Research & Innovation Associate (University of Birmingham)
- Matthew Groves – Senior Research Software Engineer (Digital Humanities Institute)