The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust aims to be carbon net zero by 2030. As a National Portfolio Organisation for Arts Council England, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust uses Julie’s Bicycle’s Creative Green Tools to measure its carbon footprint and improve its sustainability.
Andrew Anderson, environmental health and safety officer at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, spent nearly twenty years working in education and teaching English, before pivoting to a role that allowed him to work more closely with the natural world. In his current role, he coordinates the Trust’s approach to sustainability and biodiversity.
A background in education
“I was an English teacher, and I wanted to work with the environment,” he tells blooloop. “Although I was teaching and having a lovely time with that, I had been worried about the environment for a long time and wanted to get hands-on with it. I wanted to do something proactive
His first step was to move from teaching to being a guide for the Trust:
“I was guiding, and that’s how I stepped into this role at the trust,” he clarifies. “Shakespeare‘s great love of the environment and great love of nature was, for me, the link between the two things.
“Shakespeare was how I ended up in Stratford. I originally moved to Stratford to study at the Shakespeare Institute: I’ve got a master’s degree in Shakespeare. If you love Shakespeare, what better place is there to be, frankly?”
A history of sustainability at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
He outlines the Trust’s activity since he joined in 2018:
“We have a new CEO now, Tim Cook, and a new vision going forward. The Trust has always been very environmentally conscious. For example, we have been on a green tariff for our electricity for as long as I can remember; it certainly predated my arrival, because that was one of the first questions I asked.”
The Trust possesses extensive green spaces at locations like Anne Hathaway’s Cottage.
“Again, our gardening team have always been very switched on to how those can best be managed from an environmental and wildlife perspective.”
Heritage meets climate action
Anderson spoke at greenloop in April at a session on how culture, heritage and community can be leveraged for climate action. From the Trust’s perspective, he explains:
“We have an environmental policy which, as we were pulling it together, gave us five elements, which we drive forward.
“The first one is to collaborate and communicate. We do a lot of work with community groups. I’m currently chairing the great Big Green Week group across Stratford. So, our community has a lot of buy-in, particularly through the environmental side. The ‘communicate’ is there to focus on the way that we talk to our visitors. In terms of collaboration, a lot of these things have already been done by other organisations. For example, we work with the Wildlife Trust. They have been in several times to help us with our environmental elements.”
“I would suggest that is the one that businesses should start with: links, and collaboration. Communication is central to everything you do; it brings up new ideas and gives you new ways of doing things.
“For me, that is the central theme.”
Building resilience
Of the other five elements of Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s strategy, three go together: becoming sustainable, measuring impact, and encouraging biodiversity.
“Then, in the last 12 months, we’ve also added building resilience.”
This was a result of realising that climate change was already affecting the Trust’s properties and business:
“We were having to adapt to it and mitigate around it much earlier than we anticipated. For example, on the two days that the temperature reached 40 degrees, we had to close our sites in the afternoons to walk-up visitors.
“Anne Hathaway’s cottage recently had to close because of the effect of Storm Babet, which flooded the area. We’re having to do repairs and adaptations on buildings. We have some ancient trees that struggle with the weather, and we have had to replant the front garden at Shakespeare’s New Place.”
Previously known as the Golden Garden and planted out in shades of gold and black to represent the colours of the Shakespeare crest, the plot has been replanted as a climate-tolerant garden.
“During the very hot summer of 2022, the planting didn’t do very well. So, we’ve put more Mediterranean plants in there. These cope better with the extremes of British weather,” he explains. “For instance, we’ve just put in a 400-year-old olive tree into that planting. This is lovely because it’s 400 years since the Folio this year.”
Shakespeare’s love of nature
Anderson’s work draws periodically on his teaching background:
“We work quite closely with the Gap Community Arts in Birmingham. We do a walk around the Welcombe Hills, on the edge of Stratford. I did a lovely walk with a group of three young people – all of them poets – earlier this year. It was a wonderful afternoon. They were so engaged from an artistic and a creative point of view. It was wonderful discussing the hills and nature with them and discussing Shakespeare in that context. It was a joy to do.”
We know little about Shakespeare as a man. However:
“That love of nature is so ingrained into the work. It’s one of the few perspectives of his that does come out.”
In terms of leveraging that perspective to talk about sustainability, he says:
“We try to tie it in and to communicate it through our guides’ interpretation. Our guides are very knowledgeable about sustainability. They talk about Elizabethan styles of living, and how the life people would have led then would have been greener and more sustainable.”
Sustainability at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust: Net Zero goals
The Trust aims to be Net Zero by 2030 in Scope 1, which covers the Green House Gas (GHG) emissions a company makes directly, and Scope 2, which encompasses the emissions it makes indirectly – such as the electricity or energy it buys, and which is being produced on its behalf.
Anderson comments:
“We are beginning to communicate much more around this with our visitors. From next year, when they come onto our site, we will be using data and information to tell them about what we do as an organisation; how you look after and repair a historic house sustainably.”
‘Sustainable’ has several connotations. One positive effect of caring for historic properties is supporting traditional professions. For instance, thatching and growing the reeds for thatching.
Concerning future plans for sustainability at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Anderson adds:
“We have an action plan, all of which is mapped against our business plan, and against those five headings that I mentioned. At the moment, we are looking at an extreme weather resilience plan, which is going to be quite big. We have a brand, Sustainable Shakespeare, and are using it to communicate with both our visitors and the local community.
“In terms of getting to net zero, we’re virtually there. We’re on green tariffs and have just changed some of our vehicles for electric vehicles. It’s a few last bits that we still have to tackle.”
Biodiversity at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
Biodiversity is another pillar of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s sustainability strategy.
Anderson comments:
“We have lots of plans to deal with biodiversity, mostly to do with our gardens. We are currently monitoring, to try and discover exactly what we’ve got. This year, I’ve been doing a lot of work with David Brown, the official recorder of moths in Warwickshire.
“He has been to our site three times to monitor the moths at Anne Hathaway’s Cottage. We have a fantastic array of them there because of the way that we look after the habitat. There is one particular very rare moth, the Silver Cloud, [classed as Nationally Scarce A], which only lives between the Eastern Bank of the Severn and Kenilworth. We had more Silver Cloud moths on our site than have ever been recorded in Warwickshire.”
What makes the site so suited to these moths is a mystery:
“It’s such a rare moth that the caterpillars have never been found in the wild. But whatever we are doing at Anne Hathaway’s, it’s attracting those moths in phenomenal numbers.”
Further biodiversity initiatives involve partnering with Hedgehog Friendly Town to provide release sites – on Mary Arden’s farm, for example – for rescued hedgehogs. Herds of Roe deer and the smaller Muntjac deer frequent the Trust sites, enjoying abundant grazing and relative safety. They are frequently captured by wildlife cameras.
Sustainable living examples from the past at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
He offers a thought-provoking example: a story in a fragment of bone.
“When I worked at New Place, they had a cow bone. It’s not currently on display. It is from Shakespeare’s time and has a cut mark on it indicating that the cow it came from was, very probably, raised on that site, killed on that site, butchered on that site, and eaten on that site.
“I love that because you look at it and realise that Shakespeare didn’t just eat this animal; he knew this animal.”
It’s a perfect example of sustainable, on-site living. Anderson is a vegan, and yet, he says:
“That piece of cow bone speaks to me because it shows that cow would not have been killed as a calf or a young heifer. It would not have been removed to a strange environment. It would have lived there; they would have had years of use and work from it and would have formed a relationship with that animal before it died.”
In closing, he sums up the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s approach to sustainability and biodiversity:
“The heading at the top of our environmental policy is from Troilus and Cressida: ‘One touch of nature makes the whole world kin’ – showing nature as a unifying force through all of us.
“That’s what we are trying to do with our visitors: to use our sites and the nature that we have around us as a way of communicating that story and getting everybody to join in.”
