Contents (retired 2026-04-12)

Goodbye to all that...

The end of an archival centre of heritage

What is possible and What isn't

and Why

INTRODUCTION and CONTENTS

This is a website about the Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre and its successor, the Planned Environment Therapy Archives and Special Collections with the National Child Care Library. This is a national asset and "national treasure" which, as I write, is being dismantled and dispersed by its steward, the Mulberry Bush Organisation. From a standing start in October 2025, the collections must be disposed of and the site in rural Toddington, Gloucestershire, fully vacated by May 31st, 2026. The announcement came to my desk on October 14, 2025, shortly before being made public more generally. In a recent meeting, a representative of the Mulberry Bush Organisation said that any archives left at the end of May will be destroyed.

Hearing first, before the announcement was made generally, was an act of generosity and understanding on the part of the Mulberry Bush Organisation's CEO John Turberville, whom I've known for some time, and interviewed for the new archive's oral history collections in 2019. He was aware of the impact it would have on me, as the founding archivist for the original Archive and Study Centre, responsible for almost 30 years for initiating and then navigating a difficult course of inventing and building a complex facility which was recently called a "national treasure" by NCERCC's Jonathan Stanley. Finding ways of doing this in sometimes hostile environments and through a period of intense financial and spiritual austerity was my function for almost 30 years, to late December 2018, when the Planned Environment Therapy Trust (PETT) transferred its assets, including the Archive and Study Centre, to the Mulberry Bush Organisation to carry forward, as a going concern.

I handed in my keys on December 18, 2018. Seven and a half years later the Mulberry Bush Organisation is closing the Archive and disposing of the collections, and this website is my attempt to understand, and help others understand, what is being lost, why, how, why it matters, and what else might have been or might be possible; with a special look at how things are made impossible from a starting point of 'being impossible'. It is presented in the form of a book which is being written and unfolded in real time because time is short; and my chaotic race of mind when the announcement came through needed some way to be contained and controlled and put to use. The 'book' is acquiring more order and even reorientation as it goes along (see the Foreword, February 27, 2026 for one reorientation); although it is still unfinished and in formation.

Apart from previously written stuff, everything on this website is being thought in the present. If I were a theoretical physicist from the last century before computers took over, and if I had wall-to-wall blackboards and more blackboards which rolled down, any apparent order written across them would be underlain by layers and layers of rubbed out and over-written equations and questions. I say this as a retired and expert Sixth Grade Blackboard Monitor who stood outdoors at New Raguet School in Nacogdoches, Texas, covering myself in clouds of chalk, bashing the school's blackboard erasers together: Back in the days before I discovered my first computer, and fell in thrall to something which, in those magical days, was as tall as I was. Think of this as clouds of chalk settling, and blackboard equations falling into form, emotions and experience settling through careful thinking into words.

Unless otherwise stated, all views are my own.

(The announcement that "The site will be listed For Sale on or soon after January 19th" crossed my desk on January 16, 2026. It is in "Context for this Strategy: Frequently Asked Questions" from Dave Roberts at Mulberry Bush Research, dated January 2026. A first Open Meeting was held on March 17th, 2026, by self-selected invitation, once the breaking-up had begun).

CONTENTS

Introduction to a Foreword (2026/03/15)

Foreword, February 27, 2026

PREFACE

Acknowledgements

Some notes and conventions

PART ONE: THE DESTRUCTION OF AN ARCHIVE:
Loss of Community, Loss of World

SECTION 1, INTRODUCTION: Goodbye to all that

SECTION 2: What are we losing?

1. AN ECOSYSTEM

2. A SPECIALIST RESEARCH AND REFERENCE LIBRARY

1. Research Library: Acquisitions Policy (1999)
2. Building a Library: Every book that comes into the Library....comes with a story (2004)
3. Cascade of People: "In a Healthy Ecosystem, the Library Builds Itself"
4. Through the core sample, down the rabbit hole: two techniques for discovering the magic of an internationally unique research library
5. Short notes:
- People: Who is Bill Garner?
- People: Roland Meighan
- Seeking the Source (Personal Blog from 2011)
- "When I come in to work that night, I am stunned..."

3. A MATHOM HOUSE: A MUSEUM

1. Case Study: "Course members were clear that they would like these symbolic reminders of their Therapeutic Child Care course to go to The Planned Environment Therapy Trust": The University of Reading Therapeutic Childcare Tea Chest

4. A TRADITION OF RESEARCHERS AND RESEARCH, WITH SPECIALIST ARCHIVAL KNOWLEDGE AND SUPPORT

5. A TOOL FOR THE DEFENCE AND PROMOTION OF THERAPEUTIC COMMUNITIES AND APPROACHES (Not needed until the wind changes)

6. BELIEF (Trust, Belief, Hope)

SECTION 3: Context - background, history, and the surrounding environment of the Archive and Study Centre

SECTION 4, INTRODUCTION: The transition, and the successor

Part 1. Continuities

1. 1. What's in a name?
  2. Care for researchers, care for communities

Part 2. Discontinuities

1. 1. A Catastrophe
  2. A Rupture
  3. A Clean Break with the Past
    1. Craig Fees, Response to "PETT Website [being taken down]" (27/6/2020)
  4. The importance of provenance
  5. A change of names

SECTION 5, INTRODUCTION: Is a sustainable centre for the history and heritage of therapeutic environments possible?

PART TWO: THE WORK of the ARCHIVE AND STUDY CENTRE: Growing Relationships Grows An Audience. Growing An Audience Builds A Community. Building A Community Grows An Archive

"I tend to regard the people who live and work in therapeutic communities, and those who research and study them - current and retired - as shareholders in the Archive and Study Centre." (2001)

SECTION 6: INTRODUCTIONS, SPECIAL ISSUES

PART 1: Introduction to a special edition (2019-2020): "to make the obvious observable in action"

SECTION 7: CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD OF THERAPEUTIC COMMUNITIES AND ENVIRONMENTS

A. Discovering and Demonstrating the Possible
The entrepreneurial spirit in the Archive: Did one small charity archive really do all that?

The Joint Newsletter (2000-2004) or, to give it its full title:
The Joint Newsletter of the Planned Environment Therapy Trust, the Charterhouse Group of Therapeutic Communities, and the Association of Therapeutic Communities, with the Community of Communities

Archive Weekends (2004-2018)

1. Case Study: "everybody was part of the experience" : The Performance Weekend 5th/6th March 2011 (Peter Still, Red Hill School)

Therapeutic Community Open Forum/RadioTC International (2005-2018)

"Wind Down the Week" Cross-Cultural Psychotherapy Event (January 2007)

Institute for the History and Work of Therapeutic Environments (IHWTE) (est. 2007)

"Therapeutic Living With Other People's Children: An oral history of residential therapeutic child care c. 1930-c. 1980" (2010-2011)

1 "Overview" to "Therapeutic Living With Other People's Children": statement of fundamental assumptions and principles.

Solihull Academy → Solihull Alternative Provision Multi-Academy Trust (2018 onward)

1. Dear Ralph, David, Katy...Look what you've done! (April 16-20, 2018)

"Archives of Change, Archives for Change", May 2-3, 2019: Residential workshop funded by British Academy/Leverhulme Grant
Putting archives to work: Description of a radical use of therapeutic community archives as cross-professional training, and a parting gift to the Mulberry Bush Organisation.

- Note for "Archives of Change, Archives for Change" (2019)

B. Yes, and More

1. Connecting the field: Publications, communication, information services

1.1 Archive Newsletters

1.3 PETT eNewsletter and others

1.4 Conventional publications

1.2 Websites and email discussion groups

2: Recording the history of the field: Oral History and Oral Archiving

2.1 General

2.2 Discrete Projects

NAWCH

The Oxford/Phoenix Unit Project(s)

Grendon Governors

Arthur Barron

(hang on, the list will grow)

2.3 Conferences

Arbours

Windsor Conferences

(This list will also grow. Doggone priorities)

3: Supporting researchers and research: grants, equipment, conferences, seminars, workshops, PETT and Archive Fellows...

4. Association of Therapeutic Communities Adminstrator (2005-2013)

SECTION 8: "THE ARCHIVE AND STUDY CENTRE IN ACTION AND EFFECT"

1. 1. The Oxford Project and the Phoenix Unit: The role of archival support, and practical and research outcomes. [Adult therapeutic community]
  2. Henderson Hospital: A kind of Archival Weekend. Comments... on a groundbreaking residential Archive Weekend for former staff and residents of the Henderson Hospital, held and hosted by the Archive and Study Centre, with the build up to it - what made it possible in the end -, the experience and meaning of the event itself, and the subsequent follow-on. [Adult therapeutic community]
  3. Engendering community, Archive Weekends, and creating a home to come (back) to: Discussion by former children of communities who brought their records to the Archive, and created an award-winning approach to them, and whose associations took on new life and grew through the association. [Children's Communities]
  4. The Early Pestalozzi Children Project: The Archive Community at work. [Children's Communities]
  5. Grounding, fostering, mentoring research.

SECTION 8: COMMENTARY

1 Craig: "Archives in the World": A reflection on the meaning and purpose of archives and places of history, as illustrated by the Archive and Study Centre

2 Bob: "Community, Individuality, therapeutic community, and the future of human societies"

SECTION 9: DOCUMENTS

1 The PETT Archive and Study Centre GDPR Policy: a radical statement of practice and intent.

2 An Archive and Study Centre Bibliography (for the record)

APPENDICES

APPENDIX 1: CRITICAL AND EXPLANATORY NOTES ON CATALOGUES AND DOCUMENTATION

Appendix 1/1: Reinden Wood House Therapeutic Community, 1969-1980

Appendix 1/2: John Armstrong interviewed by Chris Beedell, ND

Appendix 1/3: Desmond and Anna Draper, 2012

Appendix 1/4: A Rupture in understanding

Appendix 1/4/0: Overview: Homer Lane Society, Homer Lane Trust, Homer Lane Trust Ltd.
Appendix 1/4/1: Homer Lane Trust Archive
Appendix 1/4/2: Homer Lane Society Archive
Appendix 1/4/3: A missing catalogue: Homer Lane Trust Ltd. Archive
Appendix 1/4/4: New Barns School Archive

Appendix 1/5: The Planned Environment Therapy Trust

Appendix 1/5/1: Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive
Appendix 1/5/2: A missing catalogue: The Panned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre Archive
Appendix 1/5/3: The Archive and Study Centre Oral History Programme
Appendix 1/5/3/1: TC Voices : The Planned Environment Therapy Trust Oral History Project, 1989-2018
Appendix 1/5/3/2: TC Events Collection : Recordings from conferences and events, 1987-2018
Appendix 1/5/3/3: The Oxford Project Archive
Appendix 1/5/3/4: Society of Archivists Celebrating Memory Transcripts, 1996-1999
Appendix 1/5/4: Therapeutic Living With Other People's Children: an oral history of residential therapeutic child care c. 1930-c.1980 (HG-08-16728)

Appendix 1/6: Therapeutic Communities Research Project, 1967-2007

Appendix 1/7: The Oxford Project Catalogue: "a strong argument for building archival practice, as a matter of course, around the engagement of those who donate or loan or are represented in the collections"

APPENDIX 2: NOTES (NOT FOOTNOTES)