Greater Manchester: Devolving heritage to citizens
With new powers and plans covering 10 local authorities, community networks build local and regional identity through civic action
Greater Manchester (GM) sits at the forefront of the regional devolution agenda, having been the first combined authority in England to secure agreement from central government to devolve a number of powers and associated budgets to its control. Control of the £6bn public health budget was transferred to the region in April 2016, and GM’s first mayor will be elected in May 2017.
For GM, as the pioneer of the devolved model within England, and at the very forefront of thinking and practice, networked heritage can be a tool to unite communities. A sense of shared heritage boosts a sense of common identity. And this is essential to engage communities in the social and economic transformation upon which the promise of devolution rests.
In pockets, the city-region is moving at pace toward a new and more fluid heritage practice that starts with people, and which gives people real power to create the narratives through which they understand their locality and the wider city-region.
Manchester, at its metropolitan centre, is a city renowned for its industrial history. It has a diverse demographic, with — as Leader of Manchester City Council, Sir Richard Leese told us at the Heritage Question Time event — every ethnic group identified on the national census represented among its 500,000 residents. As such, it is a city which brings together a collection of histories, in the plural, as celebrated in its biennial Manchester Histories festival. Its positioning within the Greater Manchester city-region along with nine other boroughs, with a total population of some 2.7 million, means that people juggle between local and regional identities. Whilst in some usage ‘Manchester’ and ‘Greater Manchester’ are inter-changed (Manchester Histories, for example, in fact represents and supports initiatives and communities from right across Greater Manchester), people often seek clarification as to which one is being referenced.
Our work in Oldham, itself an ethnically diverse borough with an extensive industrial heritage, further explored these layers and the inter-relationship between the boroughs, Manchester and Greater Manchester. We found that in practice, ‘Greater Manchester’ currently holds little resonance with local people as anything beyond a political construct. Contributors to our workshops in Oldham felt heritage held a significant opportunity for the borough, but that it had struggled to find a niche, citing Bury and its reinvigorated market offer as a more successful model. Of all 10 GM boroughs, only Bury and Manchester ranked outside of the bottom 40 percent in the RSA’s Heritage Index. Bury also scored highly in terms of its potential for heritage development, ranking 18th of the 325 local authorities in England.
As the city-region creates new structures to manage itself at a larger scale, the complexity of how people identify with their understanding of themselves and their locality is becoming ever-more apparent. Often, the place identity to which people most associate is reflected in how they describe their distance from other places. ‘Going to town’, for example, might mean Oldham town centre or Manchester city centre, dependent on the point of origin. At our Heritage Question Time event, one panellist described a group of young men from the Manchester suburb of Moston commenting that they would need passports to visit Manchester Central Library, just a few miles away. As another panellist put it, it is the cultural distance and the perceived need for a ‘cultural passport’, which is of most concern. One contributor from Oldham’s Bangladeshi community described how she often drives through the Pennines and Oldham’s rural hinterland, but “would never throw a pair of hiking boots on, because it would feel like trespassing”. In her profiled interview, Emily Vickers, Strategic Development Manager for RECLAIM, a Manchester-based young people’s charity, describes the range of hugely impactful programmes it delivers to encourage young people to explore heritage, but adds how a group of those same young people were followed closely by security on a recent visit to a national heritage site.
Finding new routes in to heritage
Almost universally, contributors to our research in GM have advocated an approach to heritage which starts with people, and with using people’s interests and passions as alternative entry points to heritage, moving away from the ‘wars, blue plaques and old houses’ stereotype. Two of our proposed principles ‘Heritage is what you choose to make it’ and ‘Start with people’ respond to comments from, amongst many others, Claire Turner, Chief Executive of Manchester Histories, who summarises its approach as:
“Rather than saying to people we’re going to talk about ‘history’ and ‘heritage’, we say tell us about your passion and what you’re interested in — and you naturally will go from one to another.”
Often, heritage projects that are built from a starting point outside the traditional heritage terrain achieve quicker, deeper and more direct interest and engagement. Approaches which re-appropriate the established roots of a particular sport, music or interest provide relevant context and can sustain an enduring passion amongst the public. The same is true of those projects which start with individuals and communities as co-producers, rather than follow the traditional model of people as consumers of a heritage product, or engage at distance through various consultations and outreach.
Art and culture can be important mediums through which to enable people to explore their own identities and relationships with heritage. Examples of this approach include Streetwise Opera, a national organisation working with people living with or affected by homelessness, who staged one of its biggest and most ambitious collaborative productions to date in central Manchester in April 2016, and TiPP (Theatre in Prisons and Probation), a Manchester-based organisation working with people in the prison and probation system to connect with their own lives and with other people through drama and production. Both organisations are doing hugely valuable work in using co-produced cultural heritage as a vehicle through which to reclaim identities and recast personal narratives.
Exploration of these unique and personalised paradigms can be powerful for both self-confidence, and better connecting to others. The space between heritage and culture is proving to be a safe and supportive place for building these critical and often transformative relationships. The if: Volunteering for Wellbeing programme is led by a partnership of nine GM museums and galleries. It builds skills and confidence in participants through working with heritage materials, addressing the critical issue of social isolation through a supported programme of volunteering experience and personal development.
There is a clear opportunity for a region recently in receipt of a £6bn public health budget to take note of the very real impact these cultural heritage projects, and others like them across GM, are making.
Negotiating multiple heritages
Feedback from one of our Oldham workshops was that while every citizen has a notional ‘stake’ in heritage, the dynamics of the sector can put community leaders — drawn from among voluntary sector groups, local authority officers and council members — in ‘gatekeeper’ positions. This, however inadvertently, limits the ability of ‘ordinary’ citizens to build a personal or collective connection with — and make a contribution to — local heritage.
The greater the share of influence held by local authorities, funders and national bodies, the larger the disconnect between local people and their place. Various power-brokers are incentivised to seek alignment of efforts around a stylised brand for a place, in aid of outward-facing tourism marketing and inward investment efforts, as city tour guide Jonathan Schofield suggests. This is often to the detriment of multiple stories and ‘heritage-s’. The perennial challenge is to balance integration of different ‘heritage-s’ with the need for a strong and cohesive collective identity.
The uncertainty around tackling this challenge was felt acutely in Oldham, where there has been, by necessity, a strong and pro-active local authority representing the borough’s interests, but which has led to it arguably becoming over-dominant in the local landscape. This is true literally, with its highly visible, fifteen storey Civic Centre and figuratively where, for example, the vast majority of local stakeholders had an ‘oldham.gov.uk’ email address. The council itself operates within an increasingly busy landscape of agencies, strategies and initiatives, with devolution and the associated strategic and policy work across GM adding further to that complexity, and adding — it was felt — another layer of disconnect between the local and national level. At our workshops, the effectiveness of heritage policy-making at multiple spatial scales was very much called into question. It was felt that better communication between places and national bodies, based on a better understanding of local priorities, would vastly improve the status-quo:
“‘Where is the mechanism through which places can say to national organisations ‘This is our place’ and they say ‘Great, how can we help you to deliver it?.’”
The imperative behind the challenge relates to the shared goal of ensuring broad citizen engagement in the heritage decision-making process. Participants in our research in Oldham expressed concerns around a limited ‘version’ of heritage and its appeal to only a small section of society. The predominance of white, middle class audiences was seen as traceable to the lack of diversity among leaders in the formalised heritage sector, both nationally and in many localities including Oldham — which is home to one the most ethnically diverse populations in Britain.
Co-produced heritage: a Greater Manchester Model
Building on our work in Oldham, and our earlier work with stakeholders in Manchester, our research has looked across GM to highlight projects which are attempting to strengthen heritage in response to commonly-held critique.
The backdrop of devolution and public service reform is important in understanding this shift. GM has achieved progress in part because its civic leaders have been self-assured in consistently lobbying central government that they understand their challenges and responses best, while providing reassurance of local competencies.
The shifts in heritage practice parallel the shifts in public sector management which devolution hopes to shepherd in. The ‘new public management’ regime saw public services as networks of professional resources, there to be tasked to deliver standardised services through a network of physical delivery assets. The promise of co-production is to capitalise on the expertise and energy of communities to co-design services, bringing their own resources to contribute. Several heritage organisations in GM are piloting heritage co-production.
The growing confidence of city residents to assert a story and a remembering of their neighbourhoods, communities and personal lives, parallels the assertiveness shown by civic leaders of GM on the national stage. As the head of Transport for Greater Manchester comments, at the scale of the city-region, progress in integrating the ‘nuts and bolts’ of city life, like public transport services, between localities, goes hand in hand with the slow-burning development of a shared ‘Greater Manchester’ identity.
Capital projects like The Horsfall are striving for influence ‘beyond the building’ to make deep connections with their locality, contributing pro-actively to current challenges and future opportunities, in this case in Ancoats. Through deep roots and wide networks, it is projects like this that are contributing to a rethinking of ‘sustainable capital investment’ which goes beyond the familiar revenue-generating addition of a café.
Where previously, people-led campaigns have largely been limited to ‘save’ protests and lobbying, former lobby groups such as the resident-led Castlefield Forum are creating powerful models of direct action. Over the last two years they have successfully crowdfunded and directed the design and master-planning of a proposed development for Castlefield’s Roman Gardens.
Groups like these are leading the way in a making social action around heritage a pro-active movement. It is an approach predicated on closer and more open dialogue between people as citizens, moving away from the battle camps of campaigners, planners and councils, and ‘the cult of the expert’, to acknowledge the existence and importance of individual skills, and equally value contributions from all parties. A city’s key place-shaping institutions need to invest time and support in these kinds of egalitarian and networked approaches. To do so will boost the likelihood that difficult, but necessary, conversations about preservation and change in a growing city can contribute positively to a strengthened Greater Manchester identity. Under the pressures of managing tightened budgets, the depressing alternative is a fractured community sector of special interests tussling with an ossified class of heritage professionals.
Devolution: The heritage opportunity
There is a similarly stark choice emerging for devolution. Against a bleak background of democratic sclerosis, and already criticised for a lack of democratic participation in its design and adoption, there remains a moment in time opportunity for devolution to embrace its potential role as an instigator and catalyst for reinvigorated democratic citizenship.
One of the difficulties devolution faces is the potential for it to simply create new poles of power; a collection of metropolitan ‘mini-Londons’ which centralise power and hold the purse-strings for a series of untenable geographies, which each incorporate communities of widely differing and diverse nature and need but lack solidarity. There is a very real threat of ghettoisation of neighbourhoods around the metropolitan centres; and that rural hinterland between cities is under-resourced and overlooked. In our research we have found that those boroughs within GM, but at the periphery, including Oldham, are already experiencing that disconnect to some degree. Suburban and rural towns and villages in between the urban centres are even more susceptible to being lost as the devolution train rolls on.And rural landscapes, such as Chat Moss, west of Salford, have a regional ecological significance — they are a resource almost always shared between neighbouring towns and cities, as wildlife and atmospheric carbon cycles effortlessly transcend administrative divisions.
On a human level, the boundaries that denote Manchester, Greater Manchester, its boroughs, the wider north-west region, the north and beyond are not recognisable in the way that people live their daily lives. Family, work and social connections mean that lives are lived instead across and beyond these notional boundaries. There is a lesson for devolution and heritage in this, in very simply adopting a more human approach. This approach would go beyond plans and strategies, and the static frameworks they tend to employ, to engage people as important actors within dynamic and catalytic networks, providing the basis for connected, embedded and sustainable growth. As demonstrated by the projects we have showcased here, amongst many others, heritage which engages citizens at this deep and personal level offers an opportunity to address a whole range of social disconnects and democratic deficits.
Our first stage of this research, which was piloted in Manchester, very clearly concluded that,
“the more explicit the link with heritage is in a particular place, the greater the connectivity between that place and its place-shaping strategy”.
The dystopian, but evidenced antithesis to that statement is that without heritage, there is no place. As one heritage consultant told us: “Heritage is everything that makes one place different from another.”
Our vision for networked heritage goes one step further in recognising people as place-makers. Much like the people who are finding that critical space through cultural heritage to explore and re-define their identities and re-cast their personal narratives, devolution offers a zeitgeist opportunity for Greater Manchester to do the same; to re-define itself and to set its own course. Heritage is the key to successfully unlocking that opportunity. To paraphrase a 19th century Italian politician, having made Greater Manchester, civic leaders now have to make Greater Mancunians. This effort will be built on a shared identity, based on a shared history of common values and purpose. We should expect to see GM’s heritage citizens, its activists and social entrepreneurs continue to experiment at the forefront of innovation in the sector in order to devolve and co-produce heritage across the city-region.
