A Directory of Vorpel Park: Buildings, Departments, Facilities, and Navigation Notes for the New Arrival, the Returning Visitor, and Those Who Have Been Here for Decades and Still Cannot Find Purchasing
Compiled by the Department of Placements, Ground Floor, Building 7, Vorpel Park. Revised edition, 2024. Previous editions (1952, 1968, 1981, 1997, 2009, 2016) remain in partial circulation and should be consulted only with awareness that the 1981 edition refers to several buildings that no longer exist and at least one that, as far as can be determined, never did. The Department of Placements accepts no responsibility for arrival times, impossible routes, or the behaviour of the internal telephone system.
Vorpel Park occupies, at the time of this writing, approximately forty-seven acres of the East S— landscape, a figure that represents a more than tenfold expansion from the original six-acre estate recorded in the Viscountess’s 1928 document. The expansion has not proceeded according to any plan that the Department of Placements has been able to reconstruct, despite three archival investigations, one commissioned study by the Department of Organisational Memory (itself now housed in a building that did not exist when the study was commissioned), and a Research Circular from Szymański-Weil asking whether the Park’s growth constitutes a case study in what he called “incremental institutional territoriality.”
The answer, insofar as there is one, is that the Park grew because departments required space, and space was acquired because the Park had funds, and the funds came from the Vorpel publishing enterprise and various bequests from Fellows who had nowhere particular to leave their estates and found the Foundation conveniently adjacent to the end of their lives. Several of the resulting buildings reflect this origin: they were not designed to be research facilities and have been adapted with varying degrees of success, which explains why the smoking room of what was once a small Georgian dower house now contains the seventeenth-century textiles archive, and why the stables of a 1920s addition house the Centre for Acoustic Research, which is excellent, because stables have good acoustic properties and the horses do not complain about the recordings.
The original house—known simply as the House, with the capitals the staff enforce—sits at the centre of the Park and contains the administrative offices, the Viscountess’s restored study, the Foundation’s Council Chamber, and the room in which the Sussex trunk was opened in 1997 and which has been preserved in approximately the state it was in on that occasion, including the dust on the windowsills, which the cleaning staff have been specifically instructed not to disturb and which they are losing patience with. The House also contains the Primary Library, which holds the complete run of the Foundation’s own publications, the eleven volumes of the Vorpel Archive in facsimile and in the climate-controlled original, and a collection of secondary materials of approximately forty thousand volumes organised by a cataloguing system devised by Harbord-Finch the elder in 1953 that has not been fully superseded and cannot be fully superseded because some of the catalogue exists only in his handwriting and several of the handwritten entries have been interpreted differently by different librarians at different periods, producing a collection that contains some materials in two places and some materials in no place that can be reliably specified in advance. The librarians have made peace with this. New researchers are warned.
Building 1, the West Annex, was added in 1962 and connects to the House by a covered walkway that was enclosed in 1978 following complaints about the weather. It houses the Department of Medieval Studies (ground floor), the Department of Colonial and Post-Colonial Historical Analysis (first floor, accessed via the staircase at the west end, not the east end, which leads to a storage room and then stops), and the Department of Romance and Historical Fiction (top floor, Building 3R—note that 3R is not accessed from Building 1 despite what the 1981 directory states; see Building 3R entry below).
Building 2, the South Range, dates from 1971 and was built to house the expanding sciences. It currently contains the Centre for Acoustic Research (ground floor, former stable block, accessed through the courtyard or through the peculiar door in the west wall of Building 2 proper that requires a specific pulling motion rather than a push and which no signage has successfully communicated in fifty years). The upper floors of Building 2 house the Department of Material Culture Studies, the Centre for Littoral and Estuarine Research, and, on the top floor, a large undivided room of mysterious purpose that has been variously used as a conference overflow, a temporary exhibition space, a storage facility for items removed from Building 9 during the 2019 roof works, and, on one occasion in 2011, as an emergency quarantine space for a collection of nineteenth-century botanical samples whose shipping documentation was in dispute. It is not, as of this writing, in any regular use, and the Department of Placements includes it in this directory because someone will eventually want to know what it is.
Building 3 is a complex case. The original Building 3 was a Victorian coach house acquired in 1974. Building 3A was added to its northern side in 1985. Building 3B is the former staff accommodation block converted to research use in 1992. Building 3R—the designation was chosen by the Department of Romance and Historical Fiction, and the Department of Placements has not pursued the logic of the R—occupies the top floor of the 3A-3B junction structure, is accessed via the staircase in Building 3B, and is not accessible from Building 3A despite the corridor that appears to connect them, because the corridor has no door at the Building 3A end, a decision made during the 1992 conversion for reasons that no one currently employed at the Foundation can explain. Building 3R has excellent light, better coffee than any other department, and a view of the chapel garden that is generally agreed to be the best view on the Park. The Department of Romance and Historical Fiction is aware of its advantages.
Building 4, the East Tower, is a folly built by a previous generation of the Vorpel family in approximately 1810, acquired by the Foundation in 1989, and converted in stages into research space that does not entirely suit the building’s structural eccentricities. It houses the Department of Heraldic and Genealogical Research (ground floor), the Department of Numismatics and Material Value (first floor), and the Department of Architectural and Built Environment Studies (second floor, which is reached by a staircase that passes through the Department of Numismatics in a way that both departments have learned to manage with professional equanimity). The third floor of the East Tower is occupied by a water tank installed during the 1989 conversion and subsequently found to be unnecessary, and the fourth floor—the folly’s original observation room—contains the telescope that Harbord-Finch the younger brought to the Park in 2003 and has never removed, though she reports using it infrequently. The Department of Placements notes that the East Tower has no lift and four flights of stairs, and draws no conclusions from the fact that the Department of Architectural and Built Environment Studies occupies the highest floor.
Building 5, the New Science Block, dates from 2001 and represents the Foundation’s single attempt at purpose-built modern construction, an attempt that produced a building of considerable functionality and some architectural controversy, the latter centred on its relationship to the surrounding Victorian and Georgian stock, which the architect described as “a productive dialogue between eras” and which the Foundation’s older staff describe as “the glass thing.” It houses the Centre for Digital Archive Research, the Department of Chronological and Dating Sciences, and, on the ground floor, the Analytical Laboratory, which provides services to the whole Park and which should be contacted via the internal telephone system using the extension 447, except on Thursdays when extension 447 forwards to the conference hotel reception, a problem traced to the 1994 telephone system upgrade and not yet resolved.
Building 6 is the Chapel, which predates the Foundation’s occupation of the site and has been in continuous use since approximately 1640, with interruptions for roof repairs in 1712, 1854, 1923, and 2015. The chapel holds the Vorpel family memorial tablets, several of which have been the subject of sustained scholarly interest from the Department of Medieval Studies, who believe one of the earlier tablets has been incorrectly dated by approximately two centuries, and from the Department of Romance and Historical Fiction, who believe the incorrectly dated tablet is exactly the kind of stone the Viscountess would have turned. The chapel also houses the Organ, which is maintained by a technician based in Chichester who visits four times yearly and whose visits are announced by a notice on the internal mail system that everyone ignores until they hear the organ tuning at unexpected hours.
Building 7 houses the Department of Placements (ground floor), the Department of Organisational Memory (first floor, reached by the main staircase and then immediately left, then through the fire door, then left again), and the Welfare Office (first floor, reached by the main staircase and then immediately right, into the room that was previously the Department of Organisational Memory before it moved in 2018 and whose move has not yet been reflected on the door signage). Building 7 also contains the Primary Staff Room, which holds the only functioning espresso machine on the ground floor of any building in the Park, and which is technically for administrative staff but which academics are tolerated in if they do not rearrange the chairs.
Building 8 is the Hospital, a small medical facility staffed part-time by a general practitioner who also covers two other practices in the area and who maintains, in the Foundation’s medical room, a notice listing the conditions she can treat on site and, in smaller print, the conditions requiring the A&E department in Lewes and the transport arrangements for reaching it. The Hospital also houses the Department of the History of Medicine, whose proximity to the medical facility is either a coincidence or a sustained institutional joke, and which the Department of Placements has never fully investigated.
Building 9 is currently undergoing roof repairs and has been since 2019. The Department of Linguistic Analysis occupied it before the roof repairs began and is currently split between a temporary allocation in Building 11 (lower floors) and a room in the East Tower made available by the Department of Numismatics, an arrangement described as temporary in 2019 and now referred to as the current arrangement. Building 9’s expected completion date has been revised four times.
Building 10, the Old Stables, has been converted progressively since 1985 and now contains the Centre for Acoustic Research’s recording studios, the Department of Musical and Oral History, and, in the former tack room, the Department of Textile History, Sewing, and Tapestry Studies, which is located in the basement in the sense that the former tack room is half below ground level and has two small windows at lawn height through which, in summer, one can observe feet belonging to colleagues who did not know a department was below them. The Department of Textile History considers this an excellent vantage point. The feet, it has been noted in an unpublished Research Circular, tell you a great deal about the institution.
Building 11, the Conference Centre, opened in 2004 and contains three conference halls of different sizes (the Viscountess Hall, seating two hundred; the Fellows Hall, seating eighty; and the Small Room, seating twenty and located behind the kitchen in a way that requires visitors to briefly pass through the kitchen to reach it, a fact that conference organisers must communicate clearly in advance). Building 11 also contains the Conference Hotel, which occupies its upper two floors and provides forty bedrooms for visiting researchers, conference delegates, and the occasional journalist who has heard about the locked box and arrived without an appointment. The hotel has a bar that is open to all Foundation staff and that serves, from five o’clock on Fridays, a selection of wines chosen by a committee that includes representation from the Department of Romance and Historical Fiction, which the Foundation’s trustees consider an appropriate connection.
The Academic Accommodation—known on site as the Residences, or, more commonly, “the rooms,” with the same lowercase certainty with which the original building is called the House—occupies a terrace of Victorian cottages acquired in 1988 on the Park’s northern boundary. These provide long-term residential accommodation for approximately thirty Fellows and senior researchers who have, for various reasons, found permanent residence in the surrounding area difficult to arrange, undesirable, or simply not something they have got around to. Several residents have been in the Residences for more than fifteen years. The longest-serving resident has been there since 1993 and is considered, by informal consensus, to be a permanent feature of the Park in the same way that the Primary Library’s cataloguing system is a permanent feature: it predates most current staff, its full logic is understood by no one, and removing it would cause disruption on a scale nobody is willing to manage.
The Treasury occupies a former wine cellar beneath the House and contains the Foundation’s financial records, its collection of significant archival objects too valuable for general access, three pieces of Vorpel family silverware of uncertain date, and the velvet-lined box that once contained the key to the locked volume in Volume VIII. The box is still there. The key, as previously documented, is not reliably there. The Treasury is accessible to Fellows by appointment, to external researchers by application, and to the Finance Department without appointment, which the Finance Department finds convenient and the Department of Placements finds architecturally incongruous given that the Finance Department occupies the second floor of Building 3A, a substantial walk from a wine cellar beneath the House.
The Gardens occupy the majority of the forty-seven acres not covered by buildings and are maintained by a team of three groundskeepers and one specialist in historical horticulture employed by the Department of Material Culture Studies to maintain the section of the garden documented in the archive’s household accounts as the original kitchen garden, now growing varieties of vegetable whose historical authenticity is a matter of ongoing negotiation between the Department of Material Culture Studies and the three groundskeepers, who have their own views. The Gardens contain seven garden sheds of varying age and condition, the oldest of which dates from approximately 1890 and is used for the storage of materials that multiple departments have placed there with the intention of collecting them and have not collected. A paper bag documented in an earlier Foundation paper sits in Shed Three. The sheds are not formally allocated to departments and are operated on an unspoken first-occupancy basis that has produced, over decades, a set of informal territorial arrangements that the Department of Placements recommends not disturbing.
The internal telephone system deserves its own entry. The system was installed in its current form in 1971, substantially upgraded in 1994, partially modernised in 2008, and declared fit for purpose in 2019 by an external consultant whose report recommended no further action. It consists of a four-digit extension system in which extensions 100 to 399 follow a logical building-based pattern, extensions 400 to 599 follow a pattern based on the order in which departments were established and which no longer corresponds to any building-based logic, and extensions 600 to 699 appear in the internal directory but connect to numbers whose location and current occupant the Department of Placements has been unable to verify. The extension for the Analytical Laboratory (447) forwards to the conference hotel reception on Thursdays for reasons that have not been resolved in thirty years. Extension 623 rings in a room in Building 9, which is currently inaccessible due to roof works. Extension 618 has been ringing in the Department of Placements on an irregular but persistent basis for eleven years. No one answers when we ring it back.
The question of the train service should be addressed directly. The 1997 and 2009 editions of this Directory both contained, without explanation, a reference to “the halt at the Park’s eastern boundary, for which timetables are available from the Department of Placements.” The Department of Placements has investigated this reference on three occasions and can confirm: there is a platform at the eastern boundary. There are rails. There is a small shelter with a bench, dating from no later than the 1930s, on which someone has carved the initials V.V. There is no timetable in the Department of Placements. There is no record of a train service in the Park’s administrative files. There is, however, in the Fellows’ Circular of March 1962, a passing reference by Harbord-Finch the elder to “the 8:14, which one takes from the eastern halt when one is late for London and doesn’t want to explain,” which suggests the service existed, was informal, and was known to at least one senior Fellow. Whether it still operates is a matter on which the Department of Placements offers no definitive view. Those Fellows who report occasionally hearing, from the direction of the eastern boundary and at hours between five and seven in the morning, something that could plausibly be a train, are welcome to investigate and to report their findings to this Department, which will file them under whatever the archivist considers appropriate.
The archivist will know where they go. The archivist always knows where things go.
Notes:
(1) New arrivals to Vorpel Park are encouraged to collect a paper map from the Department of Placements, Building 7, ground floor, noting that the map reflects the Park’s layout as of 2021 and that Building 13 has since been completed and added to the map in handwriting. Building 13 is not yet in this Directory. The Department of Placements will include it in the next edition, which will be issued when there is sufficient change to warrant revision, which at current rates of expansion is expected to be approximately eighteen months from now, or sooner if Building 9 ever reopens.
(2) The Department of Placements notes that this Directory covers twenty-one departments rather than the twenty listed in the commissioning brief, because the Department of Placements discovered, during compilation, a department it had not previously documented: the Department of Speculative Chronology, which occupies an unlisted room on the first floor of Building 4 and which, when contacted for information, provided a description of itself that used only the future tense. We have included it in the internal extension list at number 614. We have not yet called it.
(3) The Park has, since the previous edition, acquired a Department of Comparative Lagomorph Studies. The Department’s existence appears to have arisen from a remark made in conversation concerning rabbits. The Department has subsequently justified itself by producing six Working Papers, two conferences, and a disagreement with Waterfowl Studies regarding the ontological status of burrows. The Department is therefore considered established.
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