What a Piece of Work

The story is everything

Already merely a torso or 'fragment' when it was first brought from Greece (or Turkey) in 1625, this marble 'antiquity' was shipwrecked, and then resued by divers, during its journey here. Its inheritors sold their collection to Oxford University later in the century to settle aristocratic debt, but deemed this piece worthless and dumped it by the Thames to reinforce the bank! It was re-discovered in 1717 and taken to Worksop Manor; the Manor was destroyed by fire in 1761, but marble does not burn!

Eventually it became, by 1920, a display piece, set into an outside wall of the house of a local historian. A subsequent owner decided it caused damp, and gave it to Worksop College, as scrap marble for sculpture students. Someone recognised its historic value just in time, and one 'Councillor Straw' was instrumental in getting it transferred to the town museum, despite the view of another councillor that it should be 'chucked in t'cut'. The museum is now only a vestige, but this piece is still on display, and I thought the shifting, psychedelic projection onto it suited its mind-blowing story - which may not be over

Is so happens we had just come from (the same) 'Mr Straw's House' - the first semi-detached house purchased by the National Trust - built in 1905 in "the poshest street in Worksop, then and now" according to our guide. The house is mundane, the contents are largely worthless; the value lies in the story of the family of grocers who owned it, and the somewhat macabre fact that it was inhabited but its contents largely undisturbed from 1932 until 1990, when the Trust took ownership. The history is too long to tell, but all the richer for the its embellishment by a larger-than-life character who knew them when she was a girl - being scolded for sledging past their garden gate, and now getting her revenge with indiscreet stories of her own