The Blackden Trust Blackden


Founders and Trustees

Garry Prior Tessa Roynon Michael Peach Griselda Garner Richard Morris Patsy Roynon Alan Garner Elizabeth Garner The foundation of the Trust on 3rd December 2004

 


 

Founding Trustees

Garry Prior, Tessa Roynon, Michael Peach, Griselda Garner, Richard Morris
Elizabeth Garner
 

Founders

Alan Garner, Patsy Roynon
 

at the foundation of
The Blackden Trust - 3rd December 2004


Alan Garner has lived and worked in Toad Hall all his adult life. He is best known for his novels.

Alan recalls: 

There was a torn piece of hardboard lodged in the hedge. On it was daubed in whitewash: 17th. CENTURY COTTAGE FOR SALE. I opened the wicket gate and pushed my bicycle down the overgrown path, across the brook and up the field.

The line of the roof appeared and, with each step, the house stood up from the land. I began to shake. This was no seventeenth century cottage. I was looking at a timber-frame medieval hall. I lifted the doorknocker at 7.20. p.m., 19th. April 1957. Good Friday.

The price was £510, and I had 8s. 3d. and no prospects. I rode back to Alderley.

"And what’s up with you, then?" said my father.

"I’ve seen the only place I can ever live."

"And where’s that?"

"Blackden."

Patsy Roynon is the daughter of the architect, John Stanley Beard, and has inherited his interest in buildings, and in particular, timber-frame houses. Now retired, she has been a teacher, a Brown Owl and a Justice of the Peace. In 1983 she safeguarded Alan Garner’s occupation of Toad Hall, by becoming a joint owner of the whole property, and in 2007 she donated The Old Medicine House to The Blackden Trust.

Patsy recalls: 

It was August 1981; we were visiting Griselda and Alan at Blackden. Griselda and I were sitting at her kitchen table late at night when she mentioned that she was hoping to get someone to buy into the Medicine House project, and that if she couldn’t they would have to sell the whole site. I decided on impulse that I wanted to contribute, although I didn’t say anything straight away. I rationalised the decision later on, and wrote a letter afterwards to offer help.

The Medicine House had bowled me over as a building - the chimney and the spiral staircase. Walking and smelling and feeling the house had got me hooked before Griselda and I ever held that conversation. This house had something different. Something coming through every pore of my skin. It was something about the smell of the Medicine House and the way the sun came in through those old mullioned windows.

I was aware that Alan could only write at Blackden. If he’d had to write in a little house on the edge of Macclesfield, he couldn’t have written the books that he wanted to write. His was special and different writing – and it needed to be done in a special and a different place.

Michael Peach and Garry Prior have retired as Trustees.

Richard Morris (Chairman) is Professor for Research in the Historic Environment and Director of the Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds. He is the author of works on archaeology, architecture and historical biography, and has previously been Director of the Council for British Archaeology and a Commissioner of English Heritage

Elizabeth Garner has worked in the film industry, initially as a reader, script editor and then as Head of Development for Gorgeous Enterprises. Her first novel, Nightdancing, won a Betty Trask Award in 2004; her second, The Ingenious Edgar Jones, was published in 2007.

Griselda Garner has spent most of her professional life in the classroom, teaching English and running school libraries. She devises and develops learning resources to encourage independent research, and writes and reviews for educational publications. Since 2004 Griselda has been organising activities and developing educational programmes for The Blackden Trust.

Tessa Roynon has a PhD in American Literature from the University of Warwick and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow and part-time tutor in American Literature at the University of Oxford. She has also worked as both a secondary-level English teacher and a youth worker. While volunteering for a London settlement she gained experience in voluntary sector fundraising and management.

© The Blackden Trust 2008
    Updated: 01/04/2009		 The Blackden Trust is a registered charity no. 1115818