Camden Place today is the home of Chislehurst Golf Club. Managing the unique heritage and archives at the club is quite a challenge, so Ovation was delighted to help by providing digital copies of two very important documents. One is a copy of the lease signed by the Empress Eugenie in 1873 when she assumed rental of Camden Place after Napoleon’s death.
The club approached Ovation because it wanted to provide a digital copy of the deteriorating document in the archive for people to review without further damaging the original. We were pleased to do so, and to use the copy to create visitor notebooks to serve as gifts as well as a way for heritage properties to raise much needed revenues.
The second document was even older, dating from the 1600s and still with original seals. Camden Place was concerned that frequently opening this folded document would cause more damage, and wanted researchers to be able to safely study the contents. The Ovation team has worked with many interesting documents in various formats but this was possibly the oldest we had ever faced. Great care was needed to prepare the document for digitizing, and results were excellent.
Ovation preserves and provides online access to data in all types of archives, whether from an obsolete database or from an old filing cabinet. Our services ensure that documents from even small archive collections can be conserved digitally and shared online for the widest possible access.
More than 600 people visited Camden Place during the heritage week of tours, talks and commemoration. The history and interiors of this English country house have been shaped by the migration of people and decoration for over 300 years. The building features architectural elements by British architects George Dance the Younger (1741–1825) and James ‘Athenian’ Stuart (1713– 1788), and played host to the French Imperial court after the fall of the Empire in 1870. French chimney pieces, boiseries from the eighteenth-century Château de Bercy (demolished in 1862), and heavily carved oak paneling are among elements that comprise the house’s many layers, reflecting nineteenth-century tastes and the histories of many English country houses.