This is an animation constructed with archival images, live footage and sound all taken from Tatton Park.
The room Mrs Waugh and Lady Beatrix Egerton occupy as they await their guests contains an amalgam of domestic objects normally located in different parts of the Mansion. Through the window the Italian Garden can be seen, bringing live action into the composite vintage postcard of the sitting room.
Two voices bring us into the respective worlds of the house and garden: Marian Littler, the Mansion's flower arranger, and gardener Peter Lofthouse. Both relate their daily rituals and duties and the journey of the flowers, from bed to bouquet, becomes tangible.
The interior life of Tatton Park's Mansion, alluded to as 'The Towers' in Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives & Daughters, is a stifling class-bound world of manners and etiquette where men enjoy freedoms and privileges prohibited to women; the animation suggests this dichotomy with the immobility of the interior spaces and the dynamism of the world outside.