The Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre (and its successor)
In an undated letter to my mother, but written around the middle of October 1988, I told her "I am now being considered/paid as full-time, because I have taken on responsibility for establishing an Archive based on the papers of one of the founders and pioneers of special education in this country - David Wills. His papers will form the core, but there will be other papers as well".
When I came across this, it answered a long-standing question of when I became the archivist for an archive which came into being in a formal sense in 1989; the history of which hasn't been written, and perhaps can't be now, as its successor, the Planned Environment Therapy Archive, and what is called the National Child Care Library, are in the process of being broken up and disposed of. I am writing this at the end of December 2025.
I learned of the closure in a considerate and personal email from John Turberville, the CEO of the Mulberry Bush Organisation, on October 14, 2025; which he sent "ahead of a public statement that will be released soon regarding the Mulberry Bush Third Space and the Planned Environment Therapy Archive. Knowing the time, commitment, and care you devoted to the Archive over many years leading up to 2018 - and your continuing interest since..."
The Mulberry Bush Organisation had been gifted the site and the collections of what had been the Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre, and the Barns Conference Centre, formally, I think, with the onset of 2019, but after an informal or at least low-key transfer on December 18, 2018, the day I handed in my keys. This transfer followed a long process which began as early as 2005 (I will revise this date downward as the enquiry in these pages proceeds), in which the Planned Environment Therapy Trust (PETT) sought a sustainable model for building and growing an archive and research facility, for an approach to living and working with trauma which is largely and generally marginalised in relation to the mainstream, and therefore almost always perpetually vulnerable. The history of this approach to using one another in groups and communities to resolve the knots that build up in being human is characterised by triumphs of demonstrations of what is possible, punctuated by a rhythm of attacks on and destruction of those demonstrations, and the records documenting them.
Not the human records so much, and especially the record of those who benefited from the demonstrations, and know from the evidence of those around them and the lives of themselves and others, what is possible and why it is necessary for others. Cue here, but not yet, a discussion of the "Therapeutic Living with Other People's Children" project, which was the award-winning proof of concept of the Archive and Study Centre's approach to its work, or the work of HHG, the Henderson Heritage Group, and the use and necessity of oral history and shared reminiscence.
"Trauma" here and elsewhere is shorthand.
{This is an introduction in progress}
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