Breadcrumbs
Local Heritage Initiative celebrates 1,000th grant - 20 January 2005
The Queen’s Heritage project has an LHI grant of £16,098 and a further LHI award of £3,000 from Nationwide Building Society and will be facilitated by Action Space because of the support the local people will need. They will be seeking personal views of the garden’s heritage, reaching some 1,500 people, via interviews, an exhibition, booklet and website.
LHI supports community projects with grants of £3,000 to £25,000 for anything from archaeology to oral history, environmental projects, customs and traditions. LHI is a partnership between the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Countryside Agency and Nationwide Building Society. Over the past five years, LHI has made 1,000 awards worth almost £15 million throughout England. Despite changes in the role of the Countryside Agency, the scheme is set to continue for another two years, when a new, community grants programme will be launched by the Heritage Lottery Fund.
Stephen Boyce, Deputy Director of Operations at the Heritage Lottery Fund, said: “We are delighted to be continuing this important partnership. Having just celebrated our tenth birthday year, we believe more strongly than ever that heritage matters to people. LHI has altered perceptions of heritage and proved to be a key way in which people can become directly involved in projects of local significance. We want to build on this success and enable more communities to come together to explore, research, conserve and interpret their heritage.”
Andrew Wood, Executive Director of the Countryside Agency, said: “Local heritage is proving to be of universal interest. We are keen to help communities reveal more of what they see as their heritage, to develop new strengths and form partnerships at community level. We also want to ensure that the lessons of LHI are learnt and become part of heritage funding programmes in the future. We shall be working hard to achieve this over the next two years.”
Andrew Litchfield, Head of Social and Environmental Responsibility at Nationwide Building Society, said: “LHI has given us 1,000 new definitions of heritage. We are thrilled that the partnership is continuing for a further two years. Each project finds a new definition of heritage, each as valid and intriguing as the next and each as relevant and important to its community.”
Some of the projects supported to date include:
- Iron Awe - Re-enactment of aspects of the lives of 1860's miners, in Redcar and Cleveland.
- Topiary Apiary - Training members of the local community in beekeeping and the role of bees in the history of the area, in Northumberland.
- Cow Bridge - Restoration of a brick and sandstone cattle bridge, in Bedfordshire.
- Living Heritage Crafts - Research into how people lived in the Goole area of East Riding of Yorkshire, in the Saxon/Viking period.
Further details can be found on the LHI website: www.lhi.org.uk
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For further information on LHI, please contact Mel Capper at the Countryside Agency press office on 020 7340 2909 or Katie Owen at the HLF press office on 020 7591 6036 (out of hours: 07973 613820)
Notes to editors
1. The Local Heritage Initiative was devised and is administered by the Countryside Agency. LHI distributes funds on behalf of the Heritage Lottery Fund. For 2004/05 HLF has allocated £4 million for grant support. Grants are from £3,000 to £25,000. The focus is on encouraging communities in England to take practical action to care for their local heritage. Further information on the Local Heritage Initiative can be found at www.lhi.org.uk
2. The Countryside Agency is the statutory body working to make the quality of life better for people in the countryside and the quality of the countryside better for everyone. It is a non-departmental body sponsored by the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs. The Countryside Agency is changing. As the result of Defra’s Rural Strategy published in July 2004, from 1 April 2005 it will: establish a distinctive new body to act as a rural advocate, expert adviser and independent watchdog with a particular focus on disadvantage; its landscape, access and recreation teams are working with its partners, English Nature and the Rural Development Service, regionally and nationally, which will bring together its activities to improve services for customers, work effectively with partners and contribute to sustainable development as it moves towards a new integrated agency to be formed following primary legislation; and it will transfer most of its current socio-economic delivery functions to Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) and Defra for delivery through Government Offices. It may be changing - but its skills, knowledge and enthusiasm will continue to benefit people in rural England.
3. The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) enables communities to celebrate, look after and learn more about our diverse heritage. From our great museums and historic buildings to local parks and beauty spots or recording and celebrating traditions, customs and history, HLF grants open up our nation’s heritage for everyone to enjoy. In the 10th Birthday Year of the National Lottery we have supported more than 15,000 projects, allocating over £3 billion across the UK.
4. Nationwide, the world’s largest building society, provides additional sponsorship support to the Local Heritage Initiative. The society has over 10 million customers and it is estimated around one in three households in the UK has a financial relationship with it. Through sponsorship, fundraising and other activities, Nationwide has supported hundreds of events and initiatives across the country.
