Help make heritage your local USP
And don’t rely on a strategy …
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One of the 5 networked heritage principles
“Britain performs less well at communicating the promise of an emotive, distinctive and immersive experience… Amongst respondents who considered heritage and culture as very important elements of their ideal holiday, there was a need to portray experiences as welcoming, authentic and genuine. In terms of future marketing and communications, there was a thirst for more information particularly in terms of knitting together itineraries and building unique experiences…[and] genuine desire and interest from respondents of all three markets to know more about places beyond London.”
- Leveraging Britain’s Culture and Heritage, Visit Britain, 2014
Heritage provides the opportunity to connect personal identity to community identity, communities within neighbourhoods, neighbourhoods within cities, cities within regions, regions within nations, and nations within the world. Understanding these relationships, by listening to people and learning from their perspectives, is fundamental to developing a place-based strategy which can leverage the contributions of citizens, anchor institutions and the voluntary sector.
Behind this principal line of connectivity lies a complex system of social relationships and hierarchies, environmental psychology, community power relations, institutional decision-making, conflicting agendas and, inevitably, finance and politics.
At a time when the mechanisms of place-shaping are being renovated — for example through neighbourhood planning and devolution to city-regional authorities — heritage has an elevated value. Heritage necessitates a process of deliberation, and offers the power to draw people in. Exploring heritage can be an exercise in democratic renewal — a means for people to develop their own confidence in their place within the overlapping identities of place and community. Having a heritage strategy will not automatically realise the opportunity; places need to integrate the contribution of heritage into the full range of strategies which shape a place. Our research suggests that rather than requesting ‘a seat at the table’, at the many tables at which place-based strategies are determined, the focus should be to raise awareness and consciousness among decision-makers, injecting heritage perspectives into existing decision-making processes.
In Greater Manchester, our research points to the importance of recognising traditionally marginalised voices and groups in a city-wide articulation of ‘who you are’. The stories of overcoming disadvantage, campaigning for social change and resisting discrimination form part of the identity of any city. One of the most powerful roles heritage can play, in forging stronger local and national identities, is helping people interpret the complex heritage of social conflict.
In inspiring communities to address contemporary social issues, like the quality, design, availability and affordability of housing, progressive heritage projects are connecting contemporary social activism to the local activism of the past — as with the Living with History project in York. Work in Bristol has mapped the traces of the slave trade as well as the abolitionists, campaigns against apartheid, and movements for equal rights for different genders and sexualities, and our research in Manchester highlighted efforts to promote equality for people with disabilities.
The UK has world-class heritage, in the architecture of the military, government, aristocracy and monarchy, in its industrial heritage and in the history of its social movements. Several measures rank heritage as the UK’s USP in defining its global identity. In research commissioned by Visit Britain, ‘historic buildings’ and ‘famous places’ are the two most prominent factors identified by visitors from the three largest sources of tourists. Statistics in the Culture White Paper highlight that heritage tourism accounts for 2 percent of GDP, contributing £26bn per year to the economy. Market research highlights the opportunity to broaden the distribution of this beyond London, and beyond the traditional heritage sectors.
The We Dundee initiative shows that gathering intelligence about perceptions of a city can be an inspiring force. The crowdsourcing effort invited responses to prompts such as ‘I would love to see…’ and ‘What surprises you about Dundee’, helping support Dundee’s (unsuccessful) bid to serve as UK Capital of Culture in 2017.
Dundee has in recent years coalesced around an externally projected identity as a City of Design. Various initiatives underway demonstrate that Dundee is acting as a city of design by design. This assertiveness provides a popular and simple ‘way in’ to put a place on the map. Austin and Nashville, in the US, promote themselves as music cities. But British sensibilities can often be stifling — reflecting residual concerns that such a focus diminishes the tangible diversity of your locality, and serves to exclude. This anxiety might suggest an underlying lack of confidence among those with place-shaping power, that that power is supported by a democratic mandate, inclusive of local citizens. The confident projection of Germany’s Metropolitan Ruhr as a post-industrial region is in part derived from the government’s long-term commitment to regenerate its industrial sites as housing, parkland and cultural facilities over several decades.
Aligning the many diffuse activities across the heritage sector isn’t just in aid of driving an increase in visitors. Most new arrivals to the UK will probably have formulated their pre-conception of what the UK offers in much the same way; many will have first experienced the UK as tourists. In integrating new citizens into the communities they live in, heritage can contextualise the norms and characteristics of a local place and its population. For new communities seeking opportunities which let them add a new layer to the story of place, heritage is pivotal in understanding how their corner of the UK fits within the national story.
Shaping what that corner looks like is an important part of experiencing and expressing heritage. In London, one of the most popular heritage campaigns in recent years has been to prevent the redevelopment of the Southbank undercroft, used for several recent decades as a famous skate park. The strength of support for the protection of the undercroft reflects a wider aspiration among Londoners to preserve the juxtaposition of old and new at a time of unprecedented redevelopment. Through opposition to proposals, a strong sense of heritage has emerged in the skating community as campaigner Louis Woodhead explains.
The UK is a heritage brand with a vibrant modern culture: the most viewed video in the Britain Is Great Heritage campaign relates to ‘heritage fashion’. It is through this combination that, as a nation, we define our identity in the world. We’ve inherited from our past a rich bounty. The UK is well-placed to be the world-leader in a range of approaches which can extract value from heritage. A strong heritage sector takes pride in owning inevitable trade-offs and compromises. This confidence will come from engaging and involving local communities to feel ownership of heritage. As the first industrial nation, we are ahead of the curve. Many nations will follow our trajectory. We should aspire to guide the way and lend a hand, exporting heritage expertise.
Every locality within the UK contributes collectively to the strength of that global brand proposition. Finding, articulating and celebrating locally distinct identities is the key to unlocking the power of these individual places as sub-brands. Local heritage is intrinsic to that process. It is the quality and diversity of the UK’s different and diverse heritage environments that will sustain its USP. Every local area should find their place.
In practice:
Listen
Listen to broad perspectives on heritage and place, crowdsourcing input and ideas like We Dundee.
Integrate
Integrate heritage into place marketing and branding. Heritage is the number one motivator of trips to Britain. Remember that this is the way that new business visitors and new residents will get to know your place, as well as tourists.
Think big
Get behind a big concept, with enough space for everyone to feel included — within heritage and beyond — learning from Dundee City of Design and Eindhoven’s ‘City of Light’.
Don’t rely on a heritage strategy
Make heritage a building block of long-term place strategy. Look to Germany’s Emscher Landscape Park.
