During the week of January 19, 2026, an email from the Mulberry Bush came which spoke of the "New Barns Study Centre".
There never was and never has been a "New Barns Study Centre". I can say this unequivocally in the same way that I can say that a blue sky is blue, because I can see it: I was there from the beginning. Very early on I did suggest we call it "The David Wills Archive and Study Centre", but that didn't gain any traction, as can be seen from the earliest public announcements, for example in the publications Young Minds and Therapeutic Communities, and of course, in minutes and reports.
But it wasn't a slip of the tongue. The History section of the New Barns School Archive catalogue states, categorically:
"The building and half the grounds were sold and the proceeds used to establish the New Barns Archive and Study Centre in a former school accommodation block under the control of the Planned Environment Therapy Trust."
This is a problematic statement in several ways, as explored in a later Appendix (1/4/4), but it is also in outright conflict with the account of the same events in the new Archive's catalogue of the Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive:
The closure of New Barns School in Toddington in 1992 [the New Barns School Archive catalogue says 1989 - why?] provided the [Planned Environment Therapy] Trust with an opportunity to acquire permanent premises adjacent to the old school building to house the new archive collections and associated published materials. The buildings were named the Barns Conference and Study Centre. The PETT Archives and Research Library were also created to manage the new archive resource.
This account, too, is problematic, not least because, although we played with the idea of renaming it the Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Research Library, that never actually happened either. This is explored further in Appendix 1/5/2. But taken together, just in terms of their different narrative of the facts of the same event, quite apart from the assertion of the existence of an Archive and Study Centre which didn't exist, the conflict in dates, and the use of a name which wasn't adopted, the two catalogue entries indicate something significant is amiss. What is it? How has it come about? What does it mean? Why does it matter?
The trail of clues to an answer leads through a series of cataloguing errors, beginning with one of my own, going right back into the early 90s.
Catalogues are intended to accurately capture the legal and administrative hierarchy of an organisation, in its own terms. Ideally, researchers can see from the catalogue itself how an entity - be it a person, an organisation, or an institition - was or is cognitively and conceptually structured. How does a famous author structure their own affairs, for example? As a researcher, when you discern that a catalogue doesn't reflect the original structure, you know you are not seeing the "mind" of the entity. You are seeing the "mind" of the institution and the cataloguer. You are hearing an overlain story, which then becomes interesting. What is it, and why?
When I catalogued the New Barns School archives in the early days of the Archive and Study Centre, I completely missed what I would have known had I put 2 and 2 together, as per Appendix 1/4/0: that the School was legally and administratively a subset of the Homer Lane Trust Ltd., despite the fact that it, the working communiity which made up the school, regarded itself as, and to a great extent was, a self-governing community. That might take some explaining, in some other setting, but the consequence was, when it came to cataloguing, my "mind" over-rode the legal and administrative reality of the School in its legal, financial, and outward-facing context, and simply "invisibled" the Homer Lane Trust Ltd. as the parent organisation of the School. It's there, in the catalogue, but as part of New Barns School, not the other way around.
So, just as the Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre ought to be embedded as a subsection within the catalogue of the Planned Environment Therapy Trust (see Appendix 1/5/1), New Barns School should have been embedded as a subsection within the catalogue of the Homer Lane Trust Ltd. That it wasn't may have laid the groundwork for, and certainly removed some potential protective guardrails against, a series of future cataloguing errors.
That is clue 1.
For clues 2, 3 and 4 it's important to note that there were, confusingly, both a Homer Lane Society and two Homer Lane Trusts. The first Homer Lane Trust was set up in 1964, becoming a charity in the same year, to lay the foundations for opening a new therapeutic community for children. The second was a non-profit limited company, spun out of the first in 1965 when the founders of what became New Barns School began to take on significant financial responsibilities and liabilities. Forming a non-profit limited company limited the personal financial liability of each Trustee to £1. It was this Homer Lane Trust Ltd which took on the legal and financial responsibility for the School, and to which its records legally belonged.
Once the Homer Lane Trust Ltd. came into existence, the original Homer Lane Trust charity was largely redundant, and I imagine that it effectively began to wither away - although I would want to see the archives and preferably speak with people who were there, before appearing too certain about what it did and did not do. But, in any event, during the course of 1977-78, a little over ten years after the creation of the Homer Lane Trust Ltd., the original Homer Lane Trust charity merged with the Planned Environment Therapy Trust, with which it shared a number of aims and objectives as well as Trustees. This newly merged charity was known for a while as 'The Planned Environment Therapy Trust and Homer Lane Trust', as per its letterhead; but the Homer Lane Trust was ultimately absorbed entirely, and disappeared from the letterhead and elsewhere as a discrete entity.
The Homer Lane Society was set up in 1964 to prepare ground and support the work of the Homer Lane Trust charity. It achieved its purpose with the opening of the school in 1965 and was wound down, probably in 1965. The catalogue for the Homer Lane Society Archive gives its dates as 1964-1965.
Clue 2 is in this catalogue. Under the heading "Immediate source of acquisition or transfer" (of the Society's archives) the cataloguer has written: "Assumed materials were created at the Planned Environement Therapy Trust and therefore immediatley transferred to the Archive." This is clearly impossible, given that the Planned Environment Therapy Trust didn't come into being until 1966, two years after the Homer Lane Society was created, and a year after it wound down. So what is going on? Where has that assumption come from?
Clues 3 and 4 come from the catalogue for the The Homer Lane Trust Archive. For clue 3 we hear again, under the same heading: "Assumed materials were created at the Planned Environement Therapy Trust and therefore immediatley transferred to the Archive." This is impossible, given that the Homer Lane Trust, like the Homer Lane Society, was created two years before the Planned Environment Therapy Trust was founded. So what is going on? Barring my misunderstanding of what the cataloguer is saying?
Clue 4 is in the Date(s) section of the Homer Lane Trust Archive catalogue. Here, the dates for the 'Homer Lane Trust' are given as 1965-1978. The earlier date, 1965, pertains to the creation of the Homer Lane Trust Ltd. The later date, 1978, is the year in which the Homer Lane Trust charity, set up in 1964, merged with the Planned Environment Therapy Trust. The cataloguer has conceptually fused the separate and distinct "Homer Lane Trust" entities into one; and then, through the merger of the original Homer Lane Trust charity with the Planned Environment Therapy Trust in 1977-78, has thereby transferred the Homer Lane Trust Ltd. and its assets and legal responsibilities, including New Barns School, into the Planned Environment Therapy Trust; where it didn't, and never did, exist or belong.
Clue 5, which is simply confirmation of the conflation of the Homer Lane Trust charity with the Homer Lane Trust Ltd., is the absence of a separate catalogue for the Homer Lane Trust Ltd.
Another step is then taken.
Clues 6, 7 and 8 come from the New Barns School Archive catalogue. In clue 6, the end-date for the school is given as 1989. For all intents and purposes the school in fact closed in 1992 (The pdf catalogue behind the catalogue landing page is based on the original PETT Archive and Study Centre catalogue. It has explicit and visible entries dated 1992 (including what should explicitly be labelled Homer Lane Trust Ltd. activities), with other entries for materials up to and including 1996).
Clue 7 involves the reason which is given in the catalogue for the closure of the school. This is discussed in Appendix 1/4/4, where the New Barns School Archive catalogue is examined; but this reason does not accord with the facts, nor does it come from the extensive archives around the closure. Where has it come from?
Clue 8 is "1989", the date given for the school's closure, which is then associated in the catalogue with the creation of the New Barns Archive and Study Centre, "under the control of the Planned Environment Therapy Trust". That there never was and never has been a New Barns Archive and Study Centre is important to remember. On the other hand, 1989 is the year in which the Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre was founded. The "New Barns Archive and Study Centre" and the "Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre" can only be referring to the same thing. We are at the heart of the rupture.
In brief, the cataloguing reflects:
- The Homer Lane Trust Ltd. non-profit limited company, which was legally and financially responsible for New Barns School, was merged conceptually into the separate and distinct Homer Lane Trust charity.
- The fused "Homer Lane Trust" entity has been merged into the Planned Environment Therapy Trust.
- In this new fusion of entitities, the Planned Environment Therapy Trust has acquired the assets and responsibilities of the Homer Lane Trust Ltd. and thereby become responsible for the School and its records, and those of the Homer Lane Society and the fused Homer Lane Trust.
- This confusion then leads to an entanglement of the Planned Environment Therapy Trust with New Barns School, in which they become historically interchangeable but separate, in interesting and consequential ways.
Because of which:
- The "Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre" can become the "New Barns Archive and Study Centre".
- The impossibility of dates are overlooked.
- Sequences and natures of events can become detached from archival and other evidence; moved around and reframed.
- The never happened/couldn't have happened, can become what happened.
- Anomalies, contradictions, and even conflicts among and within catalogues don't trigger questions.
What has happened?
Catalogues are complex constructions. They reflect institutional knowledge and understanding. They reflect the conditions the catalogue is compiled in - the time available, the resources, the priorities of the Archive, the nature and availability of supervision, the decisions made in earlier cataloguing. They reflect the personality of the cataloguer who is, after all, a human being - their background, training, knowledge, skills, experience, strengths, weaknesses, curiosities, interests; and their professional approach to something that looks straightforward from the outside, but is a specialist and complex task. But they are also subject to the "mind" of the institution. And in this instance, the "mind" has lost connection with the history of the precursor institution. There is no one involved with the Archive with the knowledge needed to recognise what is anomalous, contradictory, or impossible. There is no one the cataloguer can turn to for confirmation or correction; and for some reason the collections are not sufficient for the task either. There has been a profound rupture.
There is another aspect of the institutional "mind" here, which emerges out of clue 7.
During the opening event for the MB3/Planned Environment Therapy Archive and Special Collections in 2019, a senior member of the new MB3 management team was leading a tour, during which they repeated the reason given in the New Barns School Archive catalogue for the closure of the school. A person on the tour who had lived through the events leading up to the closure, and after, came away distressed. Given that the Mulberry Bush had experienced something similar itself, it came as a surprise; and it came as a surprise that a collegial institution, which had worked closely over many years with New Barns School in the Charterhouse Group and elsewhere - the Charterhouse Group being a charitable organisation of therapeutic communities for children and young people - and which historically had Trustees/Governors and their equivalents in common, and had a shared culture and history in that way, had so little apparent understanding and so little apparent knowledge of what had been a traumatic experience for a fellow community, so much so that a senior member of the team was willing to build an unnecessary, inaccurate and distressing narrative into a day set aside for the rebirth of a facility, and celebration.
Elsewhere, I discuss the implications of the use of the word "folded", when applied to the Planned Environment Therapy Trust's transfer of its assets to the Mulberry Bush Organisation (here), and the implicit or apparent decision of the successor organisation to go it alone, as it were, rather than to celebrate and build on the achievements of its predecessor. It is as if the understanding/lack of understanding relating to New Barns in fusion with the Planned Environment Therapy Trust became a lived experience, a part of the institutional mind, which over-rode the historical, legal and administrative realities of the things themselves, and made their way into the catalogues: leading to cataloguing decisions being made which you would not ordinarily expect to be made in the context of archival practice, including internal impossibilities and conflicting narratives between catalogues, as well as statement of facts taken outwith the archives themselves and contradicted by them, which indicates, if not a lack of attention and lack of care, the lack of engagement of anyone with sufficient knowledge and understanding of the archives and the events to see and recognise when something is wrong, why it is wrong, and how to put it right. The rupture.
This rupture, this loss of experience, understanding and knowledge, has had real world consequences, some of which time and experience have resolved, some of which are just showing themselves, some of which are embedded and won't be discovered for some years, and some of which are still unfolding. With the dismantling and dispersing of the collections held in the Archive some will never be resolved, and some will never be discovered.
The coherence through which the mistakes and misconstructions or misconceptualisations of the past can be found and seen disappears with the loss of the unity and the inter-woven, inter-referencing nature of the materials in a living and learning ecosystem. The consequences of this are part of what is unfolding, as we watch. It is the loss to the future of an actor in healing and learning. It is a loss of heritage for people who will need it for the learning and healing that comes from the things themselves in ways we can not predict and can not understand.
It is a complete rupture of knowledge and understanding which will add to future distress and suffering, which is not necessary; and happens because the tools for learning and resolution are not there. It matters.
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