Sleeping Well at Ordsall Hall

Sleeping Well is Ordsall Hall’s health and wellbeing programme. It aims to creatively explore how people in Tudor times got a good night’s sleep – to see what history can teach us about living well today.

From 2022 to 2025, Ordsall Hall worked with the Sleeping Well in the Early Modern World team at the University of Manchester, led by Professor Sasha Handley. The project Sleeping Well at Ordsall Hall explored research on Tudor and Stuart sleep, health and wellbeing through creative workshops. You can learn more about how the Tudors slept here and watch Professor Sasha Handley talking about what she’s learned from her research here.

Sleeping Well workshops focus on learning about history through making and doing – where participant try creative activities like stuffing mattresses, weaving willow, making sleep salves and ointments, and recreating historical recipes like milky drinks, herbal infusions, and even bedbug treatments. The workshops use ingredients grown in the Hall’s gardens, and encourage participants to spend time outside.

Evaluation from Sleeping Well to date indicates:

• Using history to explore how people in the past took control of their health is an impactful way of encouraging people to reflect on their own agency to care for their wellbeing today.
• Using creative activities to explore health issues is also a powerful too – trying new things in a supported way increases a sense of agency.
• Being in an immersive heritage setting like Ordsall Hall and its gardens takes people away from everyday stress and gives them space to reflect.

Below are a some sample quotes from recent participants on Sleeping Well workshops – people who were connected to the programme via health and social care partners.

• ‘Doctors don’t even come to your mind when you’re here. I don’t’ think about the doctor at all. It just goes away doesn’t it, as soon you as you walk through that front door.’
• ‘The fact that you can be socially prescribed by your doctor to come here for free – I thought was amazing. I think it is a good way to use these spaces to help people.’
• ‘I think [Sleeping Well] has re-written a lot of those things from school. When you’re in school you’re under pressure to get it right. Whereas here … I’m unlearning all those nervous things about coming and sitting with other people you don’t know. I think it’s kind of helped with school trauma.’
• ‘Doing this has been really lovely. I actually feel like I’m finding who I haven’t been for a very long time. You made me reignite my passion for things I didn’t even remember I could do.’

Academic partnership

Sleeping Well is the result of an academic partnership with Sasha Handley, Professor of Early Modern History from the University of Manchester.

Partners – Wellcome Trust

The first phase of Sleeping Well was supported by the Wellcome Trust. Between 2022 and 2024, Dr Anna Fielding from the University of Manchester worked with Hall staff and volunteers to deliver a series of hands-on workshops aimed at local schools, community groups, families and adult learners. Although this stage of the project didn’t aim to deliver specific health and wellbeing outcomes – a key feature of the project feedback demonstrated how much people found these creative activities inspired by history calming and connecting.

Partners – Arts & Humanities Research Council

From 2024, the project took a more targeted approach to connect Ordsall Hall’s Sleeping Well offer to local people dealing with a health challenge. Working again with Professor Sasha Handley, Dr Eleanor Shaw and Dr Anna Fielding, this phase of the project connected Sleeping Well more closely to local health and social care partners.

Project partners included:

• Wellbeing Matters – Salford’s prescribing service
• Living Well – a talking therapies service
• Mind in Salford – local metal health charity

View the evaluation report →

Feedback from our partners at Wellbeing Matters social prescribing service on Sleeping Well:

‘Absolutely fantastic, content was great, pitched perfectly, at the right level of knowledge … People learned lot but didn’t scare people off who didn’t have priority knowledge. Conversation could flow, people could follow their interests. The group was welcoming, and allowed people to ease in. They could come, listen, feel out and then participate – which is key with Wellbeing Matters clients.’

See a case study from Wellbeing Matters →

You can discover more information about the project by visiting the Sleeping Well page of the University of Manchester website.

Want a preview of our Wellbeing trail? Download it here.

For more information on our Sleeping Well programme and future opportunities please email: ordsall.hall@scll.co.uk.