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.

Evaluation from this 5-year programme 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 few 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.

Since 2022, Professor Handley’s Sleeping Well in the Early Modern World project has brought together historians of medicine, the body, food and the environment. The aim was to explore how communities in Britain, Ireland and England’s emerging American colonies from around 1500-1750 engaged with their physical surroundings in an effort to sleep well and safeguard their health. Ordsall Hall was the public engagement partner for this academic project – where the research team could share their findings.  There are films below which show how this academic research inspired a whole range of really novel creative activities at Ordsall Hall. The emphasis was on learning about history through making and doing.

 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.

Activities included: mattress stuffing, making sleepy salves, ointments and medicinal plasters, and recreating historical recipes such as milky drinks, herbal infusions, and even bedbug treatments. All these workshops used ingredients grown in the hall’s gardens.

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
• Salford Mind – local metal health charity

A short report on our evaluation from this stage of the project will be shared here soon. For a more detailed evaluation report complied for our funders (the ARHC) please email: ordsall.hall@scll.co.uk

Feedback from our partners at Wellbeing Matters social prescribing service:

• ‘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.’

You can discover more information about the project and download our Wellbeing Trail in advance of a visit by visiting the Sleeping Well page of the University of Manchester website.

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

Some of the feedback illustrated how calming and connecting creative activities can be for us:

• ‘Making [paper] flowers seemed like meditation.’
• ‘More like this – crafts for wellbeing with an educational spin.’
• ‘[I liked] the practical involvement. Learning from…each other.’
• ‘Enjoyed learning about this practically. Enjoyed mind body connection.’
• I loved the practical aspect. Experimental learning also calmed me down.’
• ‘The whole experience was useful and I made friends.’
• ‘Great session. Informative, calming and fun.’

People also commented on Ordsall’s grounds as a really special place to do these activities – particularly in a built-up, urban area around Salford Quays:

• ‘We have always loved Ordsall but these sessions have made the hall come alive.’
• ‘[The] building and grounds and locality in the heart of the city [is] so positive.’
• ‘A wonderful space, to share history, health and wellbeing in a fantastic environment. Warm and friendly, very educated.’
• ‘It is already one of my favourite places and these sessions are making it even more important to me and my wellbeing.’