Go beyond yesterday’s battles
Make the offer, rather than the ask
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One of the 5 networked heritage principles
“You all do a great job at getting on your soapbox, but we need to get somewhere and it’s not going to happen because you’re all so passionate… I sit on the desk every day in the library. People come in every day and they want to know what there is to do, what is there to see. They ask about the museum, about cycling, about accommodation. We’re just not going to fund a tourist information centre in this town. So you need to somehow get together, get your ideas up in my library. Pick your top 10. Start telling people. We will promote it for you. Give us something to work with. It’s like Monty Python — the People’s Front of Judea. Heritage, arts, industrial history, the museum…you need to come together. This is looking like a workshop where no work is done. Everyone is on the same page, but writing with a different pen. We need to be telling the story of our town louder and bigger and better.”
- Participant at RSA Fellow-led event
Often, heritage is viewed by traditional power-brokers — politicians, business leaders and philanthropists — as an issue of civic concern, and as a subset of ‘culture’. This position can limit the integration of heritage into the social and economic development of a place.
The potential of heritage to energise a local community, and contribute socially and economically, will not be achieved by the heritage sector ‘winning’ victories or concessions from historic opponents. If heritage connects past and present, as many claim, heritage needs to prove relevant to contemporary city challenges. Rallying the general public to ‘defend’ heritage from threats has proven to be successful as motivation, but there is a risk that this is a superficial type of engagement and may prove short-lived; it reinforces the idea that the value of heritage is primarily realised through the act of preservation.
Heritage will become a sustainable component of a place strategy not through a series of battles at the level of elites, but through building a mass social movement. The power to exert greater influence needs to be built, not seized or handed down. The heritage sector needs to present an ‘offer to’, not an ‘ask of’, local and national stakeholders, which consolidates skills and connects to existing local power structures in new ways. There are countless examples of heritage organisations delivering social outcomes, including some of our case studies within this research. These need to be evaluated and evidenced in a way which demonstrates impact and value, which delineates the role for heritage in delivering local priorities, and which establishes a position for heritage in navigating the complex ‘commissioning’ landscape of departments, agencies and providers.
“Have you got the right people? To inspire with a vision, to define your audience, to speak to them, to use social media, to facilitate to bring in people’s views, to communicate through the media?”
- Senior executive at heritage funding body
As announced in the March 2016 Culture White Paper, Heritage Lottery Fund will make a further investment of £10m in its Skills for the Future programme with a particular focus on attracting more diverse new entrants to the heritage workforce. But this isn’t just about upskilling and professionalising, it’s about accessing skills through collaboration and networks, and consolidating expertise. The projects of the pervasive media studio at Bristol’s Watershed show the value that arises from applying specialised tech skills to heritage resources.
At our Dundee Heritage Question Time event, our panel urged heritage organisations to build skills by diversifying their governance in order to find new ways to engage the public and civic leaders. The very idea of what constitutes a valued ‘skill’ is subject to a prejudice to those with the power to define value. More diversity is likely to bring an appreciation of a broader set of skills, as well as the skills themselves. The government has urged heritage organisations to develop and share strategies for tackling the lack of diversity in leadership, and to report on progress. Our research shows the value of an inclusive approach with broad horizons — something which has helped organisations like Arnos Vale Cemetery in Bristol diversify its business model: “We said yes to everything. We took managed risks at small scale.”
Our research found that the museums sector, in particular, requires a generation of new skills for public health and mental health interventions. Heritage organisations could benefit from co-producing commissioning frameworks alongside the commissioners in order to realise the potential social value of social prescribing and well-being initiatives, and to reinforce fundamental heritage objectives (such as efforts to conserve collections and improve interpretation), rather than detract from those goals.
Local heritage sectors are stewards of an inherently unique source of distinctiveness, which is a key driver in place-based economic development. Recent research has made the case that creative industries and knowledge industries benefit from, and prefer, locating their operations in old buildings. Tom Walker, Director of the government’s Cities and Local Growth Unit has said of business hub renovations like Bristol’s Engine Shed:
“It is impossible to leave that environment uninspired. It forces you to challenge the ambition of your own work.”
Perhaps the hardest lessons learnt from our research involve the need to consolidate. Lots of small voluntary heritage groups are not viable investment propositions for funders. Applications are often made without reference to the local context: other applications made or approved in the recent past, and yet others in the pipeline. Less prominent sub-sectors of heritage, such as cemeteries, lack effective national networks to share effective approaches (and many cities have under-utilised resources, similar to Arnos Vale). Some national heritage networks, where they do exist, have published support for their sector in a hasty and patchy manner; digital communication needs to be recognised as an iterative process.
Some of our contributors felt that more ‘mergers and acquisitions’ in the heritage sector would be healthy, incentivised by more explicitly structuring grants for local coalitions of small voluntary organisations. Through greater exposure of local groups to the efforts of colleagues in the same place who share similar values, and with whom they can exchange skills, capacity and experience, places will be better able to confront deeper questions about shared identity, and to better express this through consolidation of heritage activity on the most viable and/or significant assets.
“There are a certain number of volunteers in the town, and 10 different societies that we all belong to. That is the worst thing for us. It dilutes us.”
- Participant at RSA Fellow-led event
Participants in our Oldham workshop didn’t beat around the bush: many of the remaining historic mills are unlikely to ever find a contemporary single use that sufficiently stacks up to support the crumbling fabric of the building. As Matthew Tanner, Chief Executive of the SS Great Britain Trust remarked at our Bristol event:
“We have too many Georgian terraces, too many historic ships, to have the energy — literally — to preserve them all.”
Our research found that in both continental Europe and the USA, planning authorities and civic leaders have pursued consolidation more assertively, and with successful precedent. In Eindhoven (Netherlands) and Lowell (Massachusetts), a core of historic factory buildings has been retained as part of long-term master-planning, with more recent development between factories subject to physical regeneration in order to make the most of the heritage assets as centrepieces for new urban districts. In the Emscher valley in Germany, a coordinated and strategic programme of heritage projects has operated across the entire landscape of the region. In Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the relic of the steel mill is the backdrop for a new casino and museum, helping to revitalise the nearby high street. In Sweet Auburn, the Atlanta neighbourhood where Martin Luther King Jr. grew up, the restoration of old homes to the period of King’s childhood creates an immersive environment for visitors, while liberating neighbouring streets in the city to adapt for modern demands.
In practice:
Consolidate
Facilitate the process of communities’, groups’ and networks’ consolidating efforts, in order to make tough decisions about heritage priorities in a place. Get inspired by the decision-making journey that other heritage organisations have been on, documented in the Heritage Decisions research programme.
Co-Produce
Enable heritage organisations to work with commissioners. Involve heritage organisations in co-producing commissioning frameworks for social outcomes, learning from Volunteering for Well-being in the north west.
Engage
Engage the local place-shaping forces: creative industries, civic entrepreneurs and social innovators. Connect these people to heritage opportunities and encourage them to lead, as an arts collective has done in Barrow-in-Furness. Connect with your local heritage ambassador, an RSA network of volunteers who want to help bring together heritage conversations at the local level.
Diversify
Add local resident representatives to project steering groups and boards of heritage organisations, as has proved successful in Gdansk. Audit your organisation for skills, including digital communication and community engagement, and seek out local people with those skills.
