Applying some common sense can sometimes be a radical move. From 9 October an oddly simple new £200m scheme will, for the first time, focus on clusters of heritage sites, including ancient monuments, protected landscapes, museums and an abbey, in specifically targeted, poorer areas of Britain.
The new 10-year plan will be unveiled by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, which has been supported by lottery players for nearly 30 years. It means the fund can spend its cash on preserving and improving a group of significant landmarks inside a concentrated development area, rather than only spending its money on individual projects.
“The 10-year commitment is such a great, groundbreaking thing to be able to do ahead of next year’s anniversary of the lottery,” said Eilish McGuinness, chief executive of the fund, on the eve of the launch. Heritage is a long game by its very nature, she pointed out, but it has not always benefited from that sort of funding approach.
“We have funded places before occasionally, of course, both natural environments and townscapes, and we’ve learned the emphasis should be on involving the people who live, work and play there. Now, with Heritage Places, we want to go further. And we have got 20 places in mind, after this announcement of the first tranche.”
Among the first nine areas to be targeted is the Torbay area of south Devon, famous for its coastal beauty – but also suffering from under-investment and a lack of the resources needed for joined-up thinking, according to Martin Thomas, the executive director of Torbay Culture.
“It is incredible to benefit like this,” he said this weekend. “I’ve been working in culture and heritage locally for 28 years and I’ve never had the chance to test ideas and work on this scale before. Ten years takes away some of the risks that limit you, as well as some of the politics usually involved.”
It is an area with a population of 135,000 which was not always living up to its motto of “health and happiness”, despite the natural assets that draw tourists to the “English Riviera”.
“The fund felt that Torbay, which covers the three very different towns of Torquay, Brixham and Paignton, had a rich range of heritage with national interest, including ancient monuments, conservation zones and museums, along with a roadmap of what we knew we should be doing.”
“It is the bay that glues it all together,” said Thomas, “but we want to link in some of the intangible heritage too, like the customs of the fishing industry in Brixham and our literary history, with figures such as Agatha Christie, Mary Shelley, Rudyard Kipling and George Bernard Shaw all writing here.
“Although we tick a lot of the boxes on the heritage indices, we also have a lot of deprivation.”
McGuinness added that the heritage fund was drawn to Torbay’s mixed picture and the obvious need to link things, something shared by the other places on the initial list of nine to be announced Monday, which includes Neath Port Talbot in Wales, Armagh City in Northern Ireland, Glasgow and Medway in Kent.
The association with the National Lottery is crucial, she said, because it means the fund is driven to deliver for the wider nation of lottery players, all keen to pay for good things. But the new scheme is not, she insists, about winners and losers: “We are very aware that all this comes from the lottery and so we are focused on taking our projects to areas of need. But we all win and this Heritage Places scheme is only part of our normal individual grant spend, which is about £800m.”
