Normally, a preface is written when a book is done, and the author introduces it with the omniscience of knowing what is going to happen. But this is a "book" only in the sense of a way of organising a disparate flurry of thoughts which have been sent flying by the announcement in October 2025 by the Mulberry Bush Organisation that they will be closing their site at MB3, and disposing of all of the collections in the Planned Environment Therapy Archive and Special Collections, including the National Child Care Library, by the end of May 2026, "disposed of" being the term used in the announcement. These were the successors of the Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre, which I was responsible for establishing and developing over the course of thirty years, to the end of 2018; and the announcement came like a gunshot, without warning.
My immediate emotional reaction was shaped by those thirty years, and the decade or so immediately beforehand, which were ones filled with joys and learning, but also with immense challenges to my understanding of myself and of the world we live in. I came out of the end of 2018, and the handing in my keys to the Archive and Study Centre on the 18th of December, in a condition for which I coined the term "reperfusion of self", which no one else has ever resonated to, but which captured for me the experience of what felt to be a genuinely dangerous and life-threatening state. It was not just grief, and it was not just mourning, which were suggested to me; and I am too averse to lay diagnosis, and too bull-headed about discovering experience and a language to express it in for myself, without medicalisation or pathologisation, to settle with 'depression'.
In brief, when I read the book Goodbye To All That, in response to the news from the Mulberry Bush, I resonated with Robert Graves' "It has taken some ten years for my blood to recover". I resonated personally with my then-seven years (and still ongoing) of innocent sounds (such as even the most cordial of emails arriving from a mulberrybush address) experienced as a bomb going off; and with the endless stream of news from a distance of the death of friends, like echoes of trench and demobbed suicides. If you've read Graves's book, which I can recommend, this may make more sense.
The purpose of this "book" is to try to emerge from all of that and leave it behind. In the process, for the very first time, I have required myself to overcome the emotional sense of going over the top, under fire, and into No Man's Land, to visit the online catalogues from the Archive that is about to disappear, and to do what I should have done for the Archive when they were new: study and report what I know to be mistakes or misinterpretations, in the hope they will not be carried forward into their new homes, if new homes are to be found; and to raise what I am beginning to think may have been a major catastrophe very early in the life of the new Archive, drawing on the catalogues and a few other clues, including brief correspondence when the old PETT website was taken down during the pandemic in 2020.
I am also hoping to familiarise people with what it is that is actually being destroyed, and not just lost, which Jonathan Stanley has called "a national treasure", and which I refer to as an ecosystem.
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Because archives, like medicine, have specialist areas of expertise, which bleed out into a lay world of health cares and well-being, there are different answers at different levels to the "for" in the question "What is this Archive for?", especially for one, like these, for which there are few, if any, precedents or analogues. It is like articulating and justifying specialist therapeutic care for deeply troubled children. In the absence of an external expertise you trust, and a clear explanation you understand, your duty as a Trustee when the financial costs of running something significantly outstrip the income it brings in, as is the case at MB3 - and with archives and libraries generally - is clear enough. Unless there is some overriding consideration, or a long-term alternative strategy, you have to say "Cut".
The stewardship of something like the specialist Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre, by a charity organised around the provision of direct therapeutic care to children, could be said to be tenuous even at the time the argument was being made in 2017-2018, and which I helped with, that "Okay, this can be justified". How does an extensive specialist library covering adult addictions, prisons, psychiatric facilities, and intentional communities of all kinds fit into a remit centred on the care and treatment of traumatised children? With the best will in the world, how do the archives of adults who worked with adults, and the archives of institutions and organisations which worked with adults - or even the records of people and places who worked in progressive ways in schools for normal children - fit the remit of training, research, education, and practice which the Mulberry Bush Organisation, as a charity devoted to improving the care of traumatised children, is duty bound to focus on, institutionally and financially?
That it chose to take on the mantle of stewardship from the Planned Environment Therapy Trust and so maintain the gathered history and heritage of the field of therapeutic environments was - at the time it was taken and within the narrative in which it was framed - admirable. Sustaining it as a financially loss-making enterpise for six, going on seven years - depending on whether it is measured from January 1st, 2019, or the late afternoon of December 18, 2018, when I handed in my keys, to mid-October 2025 when the announcement was made, or May 31st, 2026, when the deadline for having vacated the site arrives - is a substantial commitment and achievement. That it has not, as a financially, therapeutically, and politically accomplished organisation, found a way to preserve such an internationally recognised, award-winning, unique and national resource raises a great many questions, not just of the Mulberry Bush, but of the systems we live in, the Planned Environment Therapy Trust as the predeecessor organisation, and ourselves.
This "book" can't answer much, of course, but it can be an exploration. A full, rigorous, outside and independent study would be far more useful, and far more interesting. But these are among the questions which can be raised here, if not answered:
- Is a specialist resource for the study and understanding of that particular range of responses to human need and suffering which hover around the term "therapeutic community" possible or, really, even necessary? And if necessary, Why? If possible, How? In a world of digitisation and online databases in which everything is connected, and even more so with the advent of AI, will it matter that the collections which currently make up the Planned Environment Therapy Archives and Special Collections, and the National Child Care Library, will be dispersed and disposed of?
- What is it that is being lost, and how do we think this? There are two related and inter-related ecosystems involved: The Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre preceded the Planned Environment Therapy Archive and Special Collections/National Child Care Library, and there are significant overlaps between them - in collections, and in welcoming and working with individuals and members of communities represented in the collections, for example. But there are differences as well, some of them susbtantial - in collections policies, cataloguing practices, even in language and in organising and naming collections. They were embedded in very different host organisations, and the external political, economic and social environments the hosting organisations operated in were different. The hosts had different remits, cultures, and structures; their understandings and expectations of the archival ecosystems introduced different stressors. What can we learn from a fuller description of all of this, of the ecosystems themselves and the relationships between them, and of their histories? Did any of this impact on survival?
- What accounts for the fact that the relatively small Planned Environment Therapy Trust, with fewer financial resources, fewer people, and virtually no in-house expertise in fundraising compared with the much larger Mulberry Bush Organisation, was able to invent, create, develop, maintain and grow a unique and unprecedented specialist archive ecosystem over the course of 30 years, through some extremely difficult times; while the Mulberry Bush Organisation needed to make the difficult decision to close and disperse the successsor after 7? Are there things other or future archivists and potential decison-makers can learn?
- What - over many years, with both internal and external causes, including my own personal limitations - made the permanent establishment of an Archive and Study Centre by the Planned Environment Therapy Trust something that never happened? It can't just be, as Rich Rollinson suggested - who had the difficult task of juggling being both the Director of the Planned Environment Therapy Trust and the Chair of the Mulberry Bush Organisation during the long process of trying to sort out a future for the Archive and then negotiations with the Mulberry Bush - that therapeutic communities have a natural life of about 30 years. Certainly, the PETT Archive and Study Centre had thirty years before the transition, before PETT "folded" (the term used in the MB/archive online catalogues). But a charity nor an archive is a therapeutic community, and of course there are therapeutic communities (by fact, if not designation; and by designation, if not fact) which are much older. We can look abroad to Gould Farm in Massachusetts, founded in 1913 and still going strong. The Mulberry Bush itself, having emerged from the work of Mrs. Dockar-Drysdale in 1948 is still (obviously) very much a going concern. The Caldecott Community began in 1911, quietly flourished through extraordinary difficulties of wars, Depression, and massive changes in society for over 60 years under Leila Rendel's helmsmanship, and as the Caldecott Foundation is still flourishing.
The closing of the Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre after 30 years, and the handing over of the site and collections to the Mulberry Bush Organisation, can't be explained simply in terms of natural life-times. The history of therapeutic environments tells us that they do fall, under certain assaults and internal dynamics; but that they also survive, and continue, despite what the world outside throws at them; and despite the fact that each and every one of them is created, developed, and sustained by humans.
Anyway, I will suggest that our task, as people who know the importance and value of genuine therapeutic environments - and know how exceptionally complex and vulnerable the ecosystems are which are needed to work successfully and well with such turbulence of selves - is to understand, for those who can't from their own experience, what is needed and what is involved. And then to articulate it, in ways that can be understood.
You can not do that without questioning and reflecting on the history you are making and are part of; and you can not do that without questioning and reflecting on the Before. Without, that is, listening to and acquiring the experience of others, and building a community which listens, challenges, honours, celebrates, and contributes their experience and understanding to that flow of people who came before and among whom one is creating what comes next.
And how do you do that without a Centre, where that past and present and future experience are gathered together, and put into conversation with each and every and one another?
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And how do you convey that it matters? This was a task the original Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre took on; and you can see it, as I hope to show in a section on The Transition and the Successor, that the Planned Environment Therapy Archive and Special Collections (with the National Child Care Library) also took on.
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Speaking of which, I always thought I had a mouthful in telling people about the Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre, and actually revelled in the rhythm and fluidity of it. I'm not surprised that, by and large, people tended to refer to its successor as "the Mulberry Bush Archive" or simply "MB3". I wonder if this affected identity formation in any way? And I wonder if the move back towards Planned Environment Therapy (PET) Archive and Special Collections as the end approaches indicates something?
The name "Planned Environment Therapy Archive" is one I proposed. I make that a note, to return to, under Transition.
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