Bristol’s people map its past

A new approach brings community contributions into the official Historic Environment Record

Know Your Place (KYP) is an online mapping platform for Bristol, launched in 2011. It maps the city’s Historic Environment Record — the database of historically important features in the built environment that all local authorities are required to maintain. But it goes beyond this to include ‘layers’ of information from the city archive, and contributions generated by the public.

It demonstrates the ability of tech platforms to widen engagement in heritage. And it shows the power of investing in platforms; through which many different parties within a city can come to derive meaning. With its statutory status, KYP compels those developing plans in Bristol to understand and responds to layers of local history, tangible and intangible.

KYP was created by the City Design Group, with funding from English Heritage, in partnership with the City Council’s Geographic Information Services Team (GIS), Bristol Museums, Galleries and Archives, and local volunteers. In recent years, several related projects have taken the initiative to enrich KYP, adding to Bristol’s publicly accessible digital database.

Between 2012 and 2013, Know Your Bristol, a partnership initiative between Bristol City Council and the University of Bristol, worked with local residents’ groups to create a ‘community history layer’, especially those whose stories tended to be absent from official histories and maps of the city. The Heritage Lottery Fund and AHRC (the Arts and Humanities Research Council) have provided funding for several initiatives. Outreach work included:

• Commissioning a lorry with archiving equipment to aid outreach in communities which typically have low rates of participation.
• Map Your Bristol has developed a separate map to allow users to directly add multiple images, videos and text as well as to create whole new community layers such as the history of anti-apartheid campaigns, or heritage significant to Bristol’s deaf community. Unlike KYP it is not centrally moderated, allowing individuals and groups to map the city in whatever way they see fit.
• In late 2015, a new initiative called Out Stories sought to engage Bristolians in researching, recording and mapping LGBT heritage.

With further funding from English Heritage, the City Design Group developed a structured approach — called ‘Our Place’ — for the public to participate in identifying and mapping the character of their local area. Each mapping process identified assets of heritage value and promoted nominations to Bristol’s Local List. Community maps are shared publicly for comment (such as for Henleaze) and proved useful in the context of neighbourhood planning initiatives and Conservation Area Character Appraisals. According to the evaluation report for Our Place, the initiative proved

“fun and engaging with meaningful, useable results…

The biggest success of Our Place has been the establishment of a common language and spatial vocabulary that communities, planners, developers and children can use to define an area and identify those elements which contribute to a sense of place”.

Because the Our Place process outcomes are linked to planning policy, it has proved to be “invaluable in legitimising the planning authority’s view” of development proposals. Furthermore, Our Place mapping initiatives generated nominations for Bristol’s Local List of heritage assets, helping the process go beyond the ‘usual suspects’. 240 Bristol buildings were formally recognised in October 2015.

In realising a range of aspirations held by local authorities — to take on new roles as facilitators and enablers for community-led initiatives — Our Place provides a model. It puts people in a position to make judgements on what is of value in their local community. It sees professionals providing a common notation language for features in the built environment, building people’s skills through recording their place, rather than in abstract. This becomes genuinely empowering when the results are integrated into to a city-wide database, and used by decision-makers.

Know Your Place is expanding to cover Bristol’s neighbouring authorities, commercialising a key piece of heritage tech and producing a return on Bristol’s public investment. But it is more importantly a key opportunity to engage dozens of local communities in mapping their history on a common platform, at a key time in the creation of newly devolved geography in the West of England.

Read about schools using the Our Place methodology to ‘Bristol-ise’ the curriculum