We’re delighted to announce that we’re now supplying Hestia Books: a new independent bookshop in Wirksworth dedicated to creating a warm, welcoming space where literature, creativity and community come together.
Founded by Jess Dalby, who brings seven years of experience in independent publishing and a lifelong love of reading, the shop stocks a thoughtfully curated range of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and children’s books, with a strong emphasis on independent publishers. Readers can also expect shelves dedicated to history, travel, memoir and immersive fiction, alongside nature writing and Derbyshire-inspired titles that reflect the surrounding landscape.
Named after Hestia, the Greek goddess of the hearth and home, the bookshop welcomes every type of reader and hopes to create a shared sense of comfort and connection through books. Whether stopping by for a recommendation, a conversation or a quiet moment surrounded by books, visitors are encouraged to feel at home.
A new monthly book club has just been launched, and the shop will host regular author events, talks and bookish gatherings. You’ll find Hestia Books at 14 Market Place, the former premises of The Bookshop, right in the centre of Wirksworth. Follow along on Instagram and Facebook , or you can visit the website here.
Sir Ken Robinson continues to prompt much reflection and sadness across the world from artists, teachers, thinkers and politicians alike. He’s been a hugely influential figure for so many of us who have been cultivating the arts and cultural education estate over the last 50 years, and it’s impossible to overturn any stone in the garden, rearrange the shrubbery or repave the patio without noticing the impact and influence that Ken, now one of the Great Gardeners in the sky, would have had on that contribution to our educational horticulture.
Many of us owe a huge debt to him for the wisdom, generosity of spirit and sheer good humour he has showed us whilst tending the estate.
My own testimony to him goes back to when I was studying for my PhD at the University of Hull, when I met him at a teachers conference in Stockport in August 2006 to talk about his history in art education: where he started, what he continued and where it was heading.
Whilst he had a long history of advocating for arts education, it was perhaps his work as Chair of the National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education (NACCCE) with its publication of All Our Futures Creativity, Culture and Education in 1999 and the subsequent development and implementation of the Creative Partnerships programme in 2002, when many of us felt the full magnetic force of what a Ken Robinson vision of what a creative education could look like.
Whilst you can trace a direct genealogical lineage from his book, Learning Through Drama with Maggie Tate in 1977, to the Gulbenkian Foundation’s The Arts in Schools report in 1982, no-one could have reasonably foreseen the marked change of trajectory that Ken would go on to take between 1982 and 1999 with the publication of All Our Futures.
His strategy was to re-configure artists in schools projects into a more ambitious programme of creativity and cultural development in which creativity was disconnected from an arts education agenda and placed within the wider context of creativity, teaching and learning. This may sound oddly familiar to those of us who are following the recent Durham Commission’s work into Creativity and Education and their visions for quietly rearranging Ken’s horticultural revolutionary idealism, but I’ll let that pass for the moment.
From initially arguing in 1982 that a repositioning of arts education in schools was essential to contributing to a holistic, humanistic education, Ken found himself arguing in 1997 for a programme which, in reducing the significance of the arts and the artist in creativity and cultural education, was purposefully designed to appeal to government ministers who were anxious to ensure that the programme could not be interpreted as being the result of successful lobbying by an articulate arts constituency.
In an interview with me, Ken referred to a complex political context shaping the work of NACCCE and its production of All Our Futures:
I read this paper to him (David Blunkett)… he said we would like to do this… I was saying why don’t we get a group together to advise you on what would be involved in a systematic approach to creativity in the school system given how important this is… but he didn’t want to go down in history as Gradgrind…. he wasn’t comfortable with the Chris Woodhead thing… it was cramping his style … he said Chris (Smith) was very interested in this too … you tell us how this might work… who would you like on the group… So that’s how it came about…. I put the proposal together to make it happen… it just seemed to me that there was a historic opportunity here …. my own personal line of thinking has been… a continuing opening of the agenda further out… my interest began in drama… but I always felt that drama was part of a bigger picture … so it became arts in schools… but all the things I’d been writing about personally… had always persuaded me that there were powerful synergies between the disciplines… but also if you look at what was happening in the theory of science … and especially the cognitive sciences and theories of mental representation and meaning making, you don’t have to look around long to see synergies between science technology and the arts – I also knew … that the people who worked in science and maths were just as pissed off about what was happening in their disciplines… they were feeling boxed in by these strategies and so on…. as soon as (Tony) Blair started to talk about creativity, I thought this was great…. but you can’t talk about the arts for long without saying creativity and culture, not really… I also knew that…. if we’d gone to David Blunkett or Blair then in 97, and said this won’t do, you’re marginalising the arts again, we need a big arts initiative, I know they would have said not just now, we’re doing the economy…. we’ve got so much on, go and talk to Chris (Smith)… I knew instinctively this just wasn’t the way to go – creativity was a portal for all of us to go through…. so I didn’t write a paper about the arts, I wrote a paper on creativity… this was just the right thing to do politically because… this was what they were concerned about: what they didn’t know was what to do about it…. and they didn’t know what they were throwing away in the process – they were killing arts programmes all over the country at the time…. It seemed a much better strategy rather than saying…. you’ve got a problem, you’re killing the arts… more than that, it was an opportunity to get around the same table not just artists but scientists, business leaders, economists…. that then is irresistible; if you show this is actually a common argument and a big argument and that the arts are four square with the sciences and technology…. creativity seemed to be the portal we could all go through…we could all get that… people got the economic argument… it was a way of recasting it… so in a way…. All Our Futures is in its own way the arts in schools projected onto a much bigger canvas…
You can hear that interview below. It’s not broadcast quality but his insights and humour shine through – and they tell us a lot about what Ken was faced with in attempting to revolutionise our educational landscape.
Ken’s allusion to creativity as a portal through which disparate educational and disciplines might step, in order to counteract the effects of an ever-prescriptive national curriculum and increasing performativity driven managerialism in is as relevant today as it was back in 1999, and even earlier.
Both All Our Futures and The Arts In Schools trace their lineage to Half Our Future, a report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England) published in 1963 and chaired by John Newsom, which, in its turn pays homage to the work of Herbert Read and his 1957 conference report for the Joint Council for Education through Art, Humanity, Technology and Education where H.J. Blackham concluded:
We believe that neither the contribution of the arts to general education, nor the place of general education in the national life has yet been properly recognised, and we want to form a body of enlightened opinion drawn from all walks of life which will bring general public opinion to share our conviction and see our vision of the role of the arts in general and the role of general education in the life of our industrial mass society.
Remember that this was in 1957, not 2020. And if you want to dig up the lawns even more, you can find the work of Caldwell Cook with The Play Way – perhaps the first book on drama in education – arguing in much the same vein at the height of the first world war in 1917:
A social revolution of some kind will be necessary in England after the declaration of peace on the continent; for even supposing some fair principle is established by force of arms, it has still to be wrought into a living practice by right education and good government. For many of us the greater war is yet to come.
The creativity and cultural education agenda isn’t new and its call to action continues to reverberate across the decades. We might ask ourselves why we need to keep making those calls to action and why there seems to be a permanent deafness to its rhetorical powers.
During my studies, I captured my understanding of Ken’s work in a paper entitled ‘When Herbert Met Ken: the 100 Languages of Creativity’. It’s central conceit is that of a thought experiment written in the spirit of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties in which some contemporary thinkers on creativity and culture – ie Ken Robinson and many others, in particular Sir Herbert Read – are brought together to examine the impact that Ken’s work has had. You can read the paper here.
Whilst they never did actually meet, if there is to be an afterlife then at least Ken will be able to meet Herbert and have it out with him, fully reassess the impact that their work, and the work of those before and after them have had and plan for something better.
Their new visionary cultural landscapes may not be something we will see in our lifetimes, but landscape artists and gardeners move in mysterious ways so you can be sure that we will continue to feel the effects of Sir Ken’s work into the next century and beyond.
I have reflected carefully upon your last message, and while I accept, readily and without reservation, your superior command of literary classification, I find myself compelled to make a modest defence. You suggest Persuasion as the ideal expression of feeling restrained, postponed, and dignified by patience. I admire this greatly. Truly.
Yet I cannot help but wonder whether such restraint, however elegant, risks becoming a kind of emotional abdication. The Brontës, Emily in particular, understood something rather different: that passion, once felt, does not always submit to civility; that it may rage, misunderstand, and wound before it ever redeems. It is untidy. It is excessive. But it is honest.
I hope you will forgive me if I confess that I find such honesty… compelling.
Yours, Julian Pilkington-Sterne
Re: Literary Observances (Further Thoughts)
From: Maja Jović To: Julian Pilkington-Sterne
Mr Pilkington-Sterne,
I appreciate your candour, though I must gently resist the implication that emotional restraint is a failure of courage. Austen does not deny feeling; she disciplines it. She recognises that unchecked passion may be sincere, yes—but sincerity alone does not render it wise, nor kind. Emily Brontë’s characters burn brightly, but they also leave devastation in their wake. One might admire the flame while still declining to place one’s hand in it. You speak of honesty as though it were synonymous with intensity. I would argue that true honesty often lies in knowing when not to speak.
Respectfully, M. Jović
Re: Literary Observances (A Clarification)
From: Julian Pilkington-Sterne To: Maja Jović
Miss Jović,
I fear we are no longer speaking solely of books. You are right: the Brontës scorch the earth. But Austen’s world, however refined, depends upon silence so carefully maintained that one wonders how many truths perish quietly in its keeping. Is it always virtuous to wait? Or does waiting sometimes become a means of self-protection masquerading as principle? I ask this not as a provocateur, but as someone who has often erred on the side of saying too much, too soon—yet who wonders whether that failing is preferable to never speaking at all.
Forgive my frankness. I assure you it is not lightly offered.
J.P-S
Re: Literary Observances (And Their Limits)
From: Maja Jović To: Julian Pilkington-Sterne
Mr Pilkington-Sterne,
You are correct. We are no longer speaking solely of books. You admire the Brontës because their characters announce themselves without apology. I admire Austen because her characters understand the cost of doing so. It is easy to mistake urgency for truth, and volume for depth. What you describe as silence, I would call discernment. Not every feeling demands an audience. Not every impulse improves by being aired. And yet (you see how easily one concedes ground when conversation strays from novels) there are moments when restraint becomes its own kind of fear. I suspect we differ not in what we feel, but in how safe we believe it is to reveal it.
Yours, Maja
Re: Literary Observances (One Last Thought)
From: Julian Pilkington-Sterne To: Maja Jović
Maja,
If that is so, if our difference lies not in feeling, but in courage, then I find myself wondering whether the question is not Austen or Brontë, but rather:
Who is brave enough to speak first, and who must decide whether they wish to listen?
I will say no more on the matter, lest I prove your point by excess.
But I hope you will not think less of me for preferring a storm to a calm whose price is silence.
With sincerity, Julian
(Maja begins to type a reply. She stops. Deletes it. Starts again.)
This week, multiple team members stepped up to lead elements of our winter publishing schedule. From driving strategic conversations to offering peer support, the leadership we’ve witnessed reflects the confidence and professionalism that define NOP.We’re committed to empowering staff at every stage of their career : and this week was proof of just how well that ethos is working!
“I don’t like your attitude!” snaps “Serena Williams” as we square up over the club’s dubious grass courts. But I am “Andy Murray”, the greatest tennis GOAT ever, no really I am and you “Serena” are blocking me from my ultimate goal: chairman of our local club.
I am writing this email with a heavy heart, a slightly trembling hand, and a deep sense of personal responsibility. It has come to my attention (via Alex, whose tone I would describe as festive but terminal) that the Zoom link for the NOP Office Christmas Party – 18 December has been circulated somewhat more… widely than originally intended. By which I mean: I emailed it to the entire NOP CRM of over 2,000 customers, partners, suppliers. former suppliers, people who once enquired about goats and at least one person who unsubscribed in 2019.
This was not malicious. It was not strategic. It was, however, spectacularly incorrect.
What Happened (Briefly, and in My Own Words)
I mistakenly believed that the phrase “internal but celebratory” meant “internal in spirit, external in warmth.” I further misunderstood “specific guests only” to mean “specific guests… and anyone who feels emotionally aligned with NOP.” I now accept that this interpretation was wrong. Painfully. Unambiguously. Wrong.
My Apology
I apologise unreservedly to:
Nick, for introducing a reputational risk approximately the size of a small pantomime
Alex, for what will now be an inbox avalanche
Eleanor, for having to explain to at least three serious people why they are not invited to a Zoom party featuring novelty jumpers
Paul, for the inevitable confusion this will cause in the artistic realm
Maja, for witnessing a British man apologise in this many paragraphs
I also apologise to the team collectively for turning a modest internal celebration into what may become NOP’s most participatory cultural event since the accidental hack.
Current Situation (As I Understand It)
The Zoom link is now “in the wild”
People are already replying with phrases such as:
“Sounds fun!”
“Shall I bring my partner?”
“Do you want me to say a few words?”
“Is there a dress code?”
One supplier has asked if they can do a short sponsored segment
I have not replied to anyone yet. This restraint should be acknowledged.
Proposed Solutions (For Discussion, Not Panic)
In the spirit of taking responsibility, I propose the following options, which I present humbly, though not without optimism:
Option 1: The Polite Containment
Send a clarification email stating:
The party is internal
The link was shared in error
Attendance is limited
Pros: Clear, professional, finite
Cons: Requires emotional maturity from everyone involved
Option 2: The Waiting Room Strategy
Enable Zoom waiting room
Admit only recognised internal faces
Everyone else receives a warm but silent rejection
Pros: Technically elegant
Cons: I will feel their disappointment through the screen
Option 3: The Parallel Universe
Keep the internal party as planned
Schedule a separate, short, public “Festive Hello from NOP” in January
Frame this as intentional community engagement
Pros: Turns error into strategy
Cons: I will say “this was always the plan,” which some of you may dispute
Option 4: Radical Transparency (Not Recommended)
Let everyone attend
Observe what happens
Possibly write a book about it
Pros: Ethnographic richness
Cons: Absolutely everything else
What I Will Do Next (Unless Told Otherwise)
Pause all replies to external attendees
Draft a short clarification email for approval
Hand over all operational decisions to Alex
Sit quietly and reflect on the concept of boundaries
Final Thought
I understand if trust has been shaken. I understand if this email does not fully repair the damage. I understand if my laptop privileges are temporarily reconsidered.
Please know that my intentions were festive, my execution flawed, and my remorse genuine.
I remain, as ever, your contrite colleague, your cautionary tale, and your marketing executive,
Julian Pilkington-Sterne (Sent slowly, deliberately, and with multiple checks)
