Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals

The term “authenticity” is invoked frequently in heritage and related fields including tourism studies and philosophy. Setting the debate within a wider context of academia and heritage practice, this article explores the concept and takes the specific situation of historic houses to question what the meaning of the term may be and to test whether it has value. It considers who defines authenticity and discusses how it may be recognized in different contexts. It summarizes forms which have previously been defined, but it also brings together the often entirely separate debate of academics and the experience of practitioners. Recognizing that the term is employed across material culture, buildings, and places, it also explores the authenticity of experience, considering if, or how, engagement with heritage as curators, researchers, or visitors is authentic. Ultimately, it questions whether such a nebulous concept can ever be fixed or permanent and proposes instead that it should be recognized as a changing idea, dependent on situation and context, valuable perhaps primarily to those who also seek to define it.

In 2015, Historic Royal Palaces undertook a large-scale audience research study to explore how visitors to our sites understand the idea of authenticity and whether it matters. The key finding was that while visitors strongly agreed that historic building fabric and objects are important, their primary response to authenticity is emotional. Whether a space feels authentic is not simply about the material originality of the building and objects. Re-creations, human, and multisensory experiences were often seen as adding to authenticity. This research is informing and shaping Historic Royal Palaces’s work, most notably the re-presentation of Henry VIII’s Kitchens at Hampton Court Palace which opened in May 2018, combining historic building fabric and fixtures, re-created furniture and objects, groundbreaking use of audiovisuals (AV), and live interpretation led by our team of food historians. Taking Henry VIII’s Kitchens as a case study, this article will reveal Historic Royal Palaces’s research into visitor perceptions of authenticity and how this is being applied in practice.

Authenticity is considered by UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) as the link between attributes and Outstanding Universal Value (OUV). It is the ability of a property to truthfully, credibly, and genuinely convey its OUV through the attributes. However, these attributes or values are dependent on the site’s cultural associations and context. Therefore, the concept of authenticity is vague and may be subject to different cultural and social interpretations. Since authenticity is measured in time, there are multiple layers of authenticity which can be interpreted differently with diverse value systems. Since the notion of conservation is European in origin, so is the understanding of authenticity. In the Indian context due to a colonial past, the understanding of heritage protection and conservation with all the associated concepts are a borrowed notion from the Western world. This leads to the dilemma where a Western methodology for values and attributes is applied to assess the authenticity of the historic houses in India, based on which the authenticity of Indian historic houses becomes questionable when compared with international standards.

In 1945, a women’s organization—Susan B. Anthony Memorial Incorporated (SBAM)—purchased and restored Susan B. Anthony’s former home in Rochester, New York. Contemporary historic house preservation practices, the founder’s political motives, and the desire to shape and celebrate a women’s history centered on women’s suffrage influenced the house’s restoration. The initial interpretation idolized Anthony, presented her as a single-issue reformer, and overlooked the lives of other household members and the complexities of the women’s rights movement. In the past seventy-five years, the house evolved from a shrine to Anthony and the suffrage movement to interpreting Anthony as a reformer supported by her family. Today, the house interprets Anthony’s lived experiences and relationships and the lives of other household members. The house humanizes Anthony by interpreting her multifaceted reform work. Finally, the house extends past enshrining the women’s suffrage movement, broadening its definition of the women’s rights movement, and connecting historic civil rights battles to present-day struggles.

The Convent of San Julián and San Antonio, almost one thousand years old, is one of the oldest buildings in Madrid (Spain) and one of Madrid’s treasures, not only because of its architecture, but also for its history and the characters linked to its walls. Although the building has undergone several refurbishments for different uses, such as church, center of studies, ecclesiastical prison, hospice, burial place, and private residence, it retains its original connection to the medieval period. We will analyze how the building (through adaptive reuse) and its inherent relationship to the surroundings have changed. The environment, an important factor, forms part of the cultural heritage and can play an important role in visitors’ perception. Finally, we will discuss how the different types of use may or may not affect the authenticity of historic buildings and their identity and the necessity of research of the building history for new repurposing as part of the conservation procedure assessment.

Many historic house museums are a hotchpotch of architectural styles, furnishing, and fittings, reflecting the tastes and financial situations of generations of owners, and therefore rarely entirely “genuine” or complete. A few examples have been “frozen” at a point in time and remain an unchanging representation of the lives of the last owners, while others are carefully constructed art installations or pieces of theater. And yet, over centuries, museums have cultivated an aura of authenticity which leads visitors to assume that what we show them is “the real thing,” even if the evidence in front of them suggests the opposite. This case study explores two questions: by allowing historic house visitors to believe that what they are seeing is original (when it is not), are we jeopardizing a relationship based on trust? And conversely, will revealing the truth destroy the aura of realism that attracts our audiences in the first place?

An experimental archeology framework was used to examine the construction of historical dress-ups at a selection of historic house museums in the southwest of England. Of the twenty properties within the study area, thirteen were found to have dress-up installations with volunteers most commonly constructing the garments. Forty-eight dress-ups from six properties were then selected for further investigation. All of these garments were found to have made only limited reference to archeological and historical evidence in their construction. This then distorted their ability to authentically represent clothing from the past. Using these results, the challenges surrounding historical dress-ups will be explored and a new set of practical guidelines for their construction will be proposed.