At the end of 1988 I was employed by the Planned Environment Therapy Trust, a small charity founded in 1966, to explore various options for looking after the records and other materials of a way of living and working with people who presented problems to themselves and/or to others. The primary terms for that "way of living and working with", read as a hendiadys, grew out of the 1930s: "planned environment (or environmental) therapy"- largely congate with 'milieu therapy' - and "therapeutic community".
That way of 'living and working' sometimes has names, but often hasn't, except locally, as it arises from human relations and the realities of being being human, and being human together. This presents an interesting challenge for an archivist building up records and memories of "the Field" beyond the "primary terms"; but of the gifted terms I was specifically asked to begin with, 'Planned Environment Therapy' is, for me, a kind, descriptive term which came from people who invested themselves in others, and made major sacrifices to do so. The term which blossomed out of the Second World War and for a time filled the space was "therapeutic community", which in its two terms, interacting and brought together, captures an essence which is lost in its now-common abbreviation "TC".
Anyway, in 1989 I was asked by the Planned Environment Therapy Trust to establish a comprehensive, activist Archive and Study Centre devoted broadly to Planned Environment Therapy/ Therapeutic Community, and continued to do that for almost 30 years, until the week before Christmas 2018, when I handed in my keys, and possession and responsibility passed to the Mulberry Bush Organisation. The Mulberry Bush Organisation renamed the 'Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre' the 'Planned Environment Therapy Archive and Special Collections', and renamed the site, formerly the 'Barns Conference Centre', the 'Mulberry Bush Third Space", or MB3.
A little under seven years later, in October 2025, without warning and without consultation - apparently even without consulting the archivists and other staff who would have to oversee and carry through the consequences of what was being announced - the Mulberry Bush Organised sent official notification that they would be closing the site and disposing of the extensive and unique archive, library, oral history and museum collections by May 31st, 2026, seven months later. Although written appeals went to the Mulberry Bush Organisation's Chair of Trustees to reconsider, these were bucked to the CEO and Deputy CEO, and it became clear that the decision had been made and, whatever the consequences and impact, was not going to be reversed. It was a fait accompli.
What you see here is an evolving website in which I try to understand, come to terms with, and explain all this. Initially, when I believed the enormity of destruction would be self-evident and lead to a change of direction, the website revolved around what was in danger of being lost. When it became clear that it was a non-negotiable corporate decision, the website shifted focus to what is being lost, as if there might be an external world of riders on white horses who might even at the last moment intervene. Now that the site has been emptied and the collections have been dispersed, the website has shifted once again to look back at what has been lost. What has been lost allows for a celebration of what has been, which is more comfortable and uplifting; but you'll see in this website that all three stages are cohabiting, because it is a work in progress.
The website will increasingly attempt to address the "WHY? and HOW?" questions: how it has come about that an internationally unique and significant resource, an award-winning national asset and national treasure (as described by Jonathan Stanley of NCERCC) a rich, unique and complex facility built up over almost 40 years, has been intentionally (!) dismantled and destroyed.
What does this tell us about the past and future of therapeutic community work with children, adolescents, and adults, nationally and internationally. What does it tell us about the former steward of this treasure, the Mulberry Bush Organiation, one of the most highly regarded British organisations devoted to therapeutic work with children and young people? What does it tell us about the British relationship to its own past and heritage: which is to say, its belief in and understanding of its future?
What does it tell us about the institutional ownership of a heritage which belongs to others?
This is a rather immense and at times distressing task, and I am grateful for your taking the time to be here - bearing with the odd way in which different parts are organised and re-organised, written and re-written, and asking you to effectively discover the story for yourself to some extent through the raw materials of past writings and new syntheses, as the site develops. If you have visited before, you will see that as of April 12th, 2026, as the process at MB3 developed, and hope for a re-think disappeared, the site has been re-structured. The previous structure can be found here. Now that the fait accompli is complete, I will be reconsidering the structure again.
If you would like to, you should be able to read this website as you would a book, clicking through at the bottom of each page to move to the next chapter.
Despite the context of destruction, you will find a lot of joy, creativity and love here. You can not work successfully with archives based in traumatic experience, and with the people and institutions represented in them, without a sense of play, and a continually renewed sense of just how amazing, as well as terrible, we as human beings can be. And this, along with records of trauma, and of those who have worked with it over the past hundred-plus years, is what the old and gone Archive held and made available to the world.
