Ian Morrison, Head of the Historic Environment at the Heritage Lottery Fund, introduces the HLF’s new schemes.
On 22 April 2013, Dame Jenny Abramsky (Chair of the Heritage Lottery Fund) was joined by Nick Boles MP (Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Planning), Ian Marcus (Chair of the Prince’s Regeneration Trust) and Ian Lush (Chief Executive of the Architectural Heritage Fund) to launch Heritage Enterprise, the Heritage Lottery Fund’s £25m per annum grant programme for projects that seek to achieve economic growth by investing in heritage. This new programme, offering grants of between £100,000 and £5,000,000, is primarily intended to help enterprising community organisations rescue neglected historic buildings and sites and return them to a viable productive use.
We at HLF have set ourselves high ambitions for the programme – we want it to help kick start a new wave of private investment into heritage, encouraging a new generation of partnerships between social and commercial enterprise organisations.
HLF’s research has shown that historic buildings can attract businesses that are more productive and can generate more wealth than is the average across the whole economy. Yet, many historic buildings and sites lie vacant and derelict, unable to fulfil their economic potential. Heritage Enterprise is designed to bridge the funding gap that prevents a historic asset in need of repair from being returned to a beneficial and commercial use. By closing the deficit we hope to enable community organisations to work with the private sector to deliver commercially viable projects.
Butcher Works in Sheffield (photo copyright Nigel Hillier)
Alongside Heritage Enterprise, we have also started offering start-up grants of between £3,000 and £10,000 to help community organisations set themselves up and undertake options appraisals and condition surveys to determine the most sustainable solution for their historic building. We have seen how important grants from the Architectural Heritage Fund have been to get the ball rolling – to enable organisations to get professional help to determine the best way forward – and our new grants will work alongside the AHF’s own new programme, the Project Viability Grants.
Butcher Works interior (photo copyright Nigel Hillier)
Heritage Enterprise has been informed by the first comprehensive analysis of how the UK’s historic buildings are used by businesses, which was also published on 22 April. The research – New Ideas Need Old Buildings – shows that rather than a barrier, heritage can be a catalyst for growth. It looks at the nature of the businesses that are found in listed buildings – buildings which many have said stand in the way of development. We found that: –
• Historic buildings in our towns and cities have a greater concentration of businesses linked to the most productive parts of our economy – the creative & cultural sector and professional services – than is found across the UK economy as a whole.
• Listed buildings are highly attractive to creative industry start-ups – with over 60% established in the last three years in the buildings we surveyed.
• That listed buildings are far more likely to be occupied by the types of independent non-branded business that give places a sense of distinctiveness, authenticity and diversity.
• And that across the UK, the businesses based in listed buildings make an estimated annual contribution to UK GDP of £47billion and employ approximately 1.4 million people.
These findings back up something we’ve known for a while – that innovation, new products, new services – indeed new economic growth – flourish in a distinctive historic environment. New ideas not only need old buildings, but positively thrive in them.
For more details visit: http://www.hlf.org.uk/HowToApply/programmes/Pages/Heritage_Enterprise.aspx
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