Creating Connections across Yorkshire and the North East

Our two caseworkers, Alison Edwards and Catherine Bell recently joined representatives from organisations across the heritage sector at a ‘Creating Connections’ regional event organised by The Heritage Alliance and funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

It was a joy to meet people face to face. Teams / Zoom is great for time efficiency but short on human interaction. Those side conversations can yield fantastic connections, sense checks and information sharing.

There were very useful insights into initiatives different organisations have used to engage local people and strategies to maximise public benefits around the historic environment as part of new development.

We gave a presentation on how our terrific student placements have contributed valuable capacity to our team, by looking back over planning outcomes following our casework advice and creating resources to help people engage with their local historic environment as part of the Festival of Archaeology.

The day included a tour around York Minster’s amazing new Centre for Heritage Craft Skills. Seeing how technology is enabling time efficiencies without compromising craftmanship but instead allowing new investment in training stone mason apprentices and potentially supporting the preparation of masonry for other heritage buildings in the region was fantastic.

I have many ‘take aways’ from the day. Sheffield now has a ‘reuse first’ policy in their Local Plan – a wonderful policy hook to secure the heritage and carbon benefits of adaptive reuse of old buildings, as opposed to demolition and new build.

In just two years the Piece Hall in Halifax have managed to generate £300,000 by adding a £1.70 ‘Restoration Levy’ to gig tickets.

 An afternoon session had us all discussing how the localism agenda and the creation of new regional Mayors gives a lot of opportunity to focus attention on local heritage and heritage-led regeneration which comes from improved pride in place.