Church Buildings Are Vital to Levelling Up

Claire Walker - Chief Executive, National Churches Trust

In September 2020, the National Churches Trust published The House of Good. This report quantified, for the first time ever, the social value of all church buildings in the UK. Not just the bricks and mortar but the welfare and wellbeing they create in our communities.

In 2020, our researchers estimated that the total social value of UK church buildings is around £12.4 billion a year. That's about what the NHS spent on mental health in 2018.

The statistics in The House of Good are underpinned by figures established by HM Treasury to evaluate policies and put a financial value on things that cannot be bought and sold. For example the value derived from a foodbank run by volunteers or the satisfaction that comes from a moment of quiet reflection at the back of a church.

The methods used by the Treasury to assess policies and determine their values are published in The Green Book. These methods have now been revised. They enable us to say in 2021 that the economic and social value of church buildings is much higher than we thought in 2020.

One change to The Green Book adjusts the way the Treasury supports policy interventions and prioritises those that are intended to address regional economic disparities. It is intended to "enable ministers and other decision makers to fully understand what investments they need to make to most effectively drive the delivery of the levelling up agenda.

The prioritisation of policy interventions that support the government's levelling up agenda effectively confirms what The House of Good made crystal clear, namely that church buildings provide massive social support for people and communities throughout the UK. Furthermore, many of the most socially active churches are in deprived areas. They make a particularly important contribution towards achieving greater equality.

Bringing people together for the common good

Besides prioritising efforts to create a more equitable society, The Green Book has changed the way the government measures wellbeing. This new guidance was published in July 2021. The House of Good used the WELLBY to put a price on the non- market value of the activities taking place in church buildings. This is a new tool and its name is short for Wellbeing Guidance for Appraisal. Our report used a very conservative rate to reach the total of £12.4 billion a year for the social value of church buildings in the UK.

In July 2021, HM Treasury adopted the WELLBY as its primary measure for wellbeing. But, it officially recommended that a unit of wellbeing, a WELLBY, be given an average monetary value of £13,000. This is more than five times higher than the average figure used in The House of Good.

In short, by using HM Treasury's figures, we find that the yearly social value of churches in the UK and the activities that take place in them is about £55.7 billion. That is twice as much as local authorities spend on adult social care. For every £1 invested in a church, the return is over £16. That's four or five times more than would be expected in other spheres of investment.

As The House of Good makes extremely clear, running food banks, youth services, mental health counselling is what happens in church buildings all the time. Churches provide a vital, ready-made support network to help communities level up.

Churches are vital to their communities

We know how vital churches are to their communities and we want to help them fulfil their roles. We cannot do this alone. Investment from philanthropic trusts, individuals and from central and local government is essential to keep churches open and in good repair with up to date community facilities.

Support for church buildings is a vital step towards addressing the inequalities that have developed in the UK and are holding back the lives of millions of our fellow citizens.

Image: St Nicholas' Church, Nether Compton, Dorset (2018), © National Churches Trust.

Heritage Development Trusts: Helping create distinctive futures for our towns and cities

Matthew Mckeague - CEO, Architectural Heritage Fund

Ten years ago, the people of Coventry were fighting the potential sale of a much-loved historic asset, Charterhouse. The building and parkland, one of the last remaining Carthusian monasteries in the country, had been gifted to the city by its last owner. After 50 years of different uses the building was put up for sale, triggering an impassioned community campaign to stop the loss of such an important community asset. Out of this was borne the Charterhouse Coventry Preservation Trust (CCPT).

Fast forward ten years and Historic Coventry Trust (as CCPT became) has just celebrated its tenth birthday in the grounds of Charterhouse where a multi-million-pound restoration is well under way and due to finish in spring next year. Over the course of those ten years the Trust has grown in its ambition; from one site to multiple heritage assets across the city plus a stretch of high street known as the Burges and Hales Street. A number of factors have driven its growth.

Austerity has affected Coventry City Council over the past decade, as it has every other local authority in the country. Coming up with answers for complex and costly buildings has been difficult and in many places the response, too often than not unfortunately, has been to simply put up a ‘for sale’ sign on buildings. At best, this has led to rather mixed results. But in Coventry, a bolder and more strategic approach by the City Council will eventually lead to the transfer of over twenty buildings to its local specialist trust. Historic Coventry Trust is a model that goes well beyond a typical heritage charity, combining a number of roles and specialisms: part social enterprise, property developer, historic building manager, landlord and imaginative animator of city-wide spaces and buildings.

What Historic Coventry Trust brings is a drive and focus to the reuse and management of the city’s historic buildings, one that is now difficult for local authorities to achieve on their own. What is different in Coventry, compared to other projects, is in the way it is approached by both the local authority and Historic Coventry Trust. There is a city-wide approach and, as well as transferring ‘challenging’ buildings (sometimes a euphemism for complicated and costly) and assets, the local authority has also transferred buildings that can start to generate an income for the Trust and to help build its balance sheet. And what Historic Coventry Trust brings, alongside that focus, is an ability to help turn around historic buildings too challenging for the private sector or where the end value will fall short of the investment required.

This is paying dividends, as long neglected or under used buildings are being enhanced or being brought back into use for a variety of purposes that will support the city centre’s evolution and revival. These include cultural uses at Drapers’ Hall; to historic, high quality holiday accommodation at Priory Row or within the medieval city gates, a stone’s throw from the masterpiece that is Coventry Cathedral. The Trust has also taken on a 20th century building in Metropolis, which is being run as a restaurant and social enterprise training centre. And I remain hopeful that one day there will be an opportunity for the Trust to revive one of the city’s outstanding post-war buildings; arguably the finest in the UK but which, unfortunately, are still not prized in the same way as some of the older historic buildings.

The example of Coventry and a small number of other trusts like it elsewhere in the UK led to the Architectural Heritage Fund’s development of the Heritage Development Trust pilot programme in 2019. This programme, funded by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, is now financing Historic Coventry Trust and six other similar trusts, all at different stages of development, to scale up their ambitions. These trusts are taking on and developing multiple historic building projects in town and city centres, with the aim of creating modern uses that meet 21st century community needs; everything from workspace to housing to arts uses. They are also retaining and re-using much loved buildings that form part of their communities’ unique identity and provide a unique asset base from which to drive a local economic development strategy. And as the climate crisis grows, there will be an increasing drive to reuse buildings over demolition and new build. These organisations are about the future, as much as the past.

Turning around our ‘left behind’ places or towns and cities that need ‘levelling up’ will take more than a few years. One-off capital injections are useful but will not be transformative without also developing local capacity and institutions. And our ambition needs to go beyond public realm works here or a new budget hotel there. Long term strategies are needed. At the Architectural Heritage Fund, we are hoping to help fund more Heritage Development Trusts that can assist in the delivery of these local strategies, particularly where a council is placing emphasis on the role of heritage-led regeneration.

We believe they can be a key building block in delivering unique, sustainable and thriving city and town centres.

Image: Historic Coventry © The Architectural Heritage Fund.

What does ‘Levelling Up’ mean?

Jason Jones-Hall, Director of Five10Twelve

As DLUHC’s Minister for Levelling Up, Neil O’Brien MP is in a better position than most to define what Levelling Up means. In his recent piece for the Guardian, O’Brien said:

“Levelling up isn’t about north or south or city or town. It’s about restoring local pride”.

Taking this as its core purpose, it’s clear that heritage has a huge role to play. At our recent event for Pioneering Places in Westminster, Historic England’s CEO, Duncan Wilson, outlined exactly how decisions regarding investment in heritage can have either a positive or negative impact on civic pride:

“A large public building with plywood over the windows or the glass broken in the middle of a historic town or high street is a really poor indication that nobody cares. But a building like that that’s been around for 20 years and suddenly the plywood comes down, the scaffolding goes up and somebody’s beginning to do something …? A new use is absolutely critical to all of this as a really powerful symbol of regeneration”.

As lead delivery partners for both the Pioneering Places Research and Knowledge Base and the Cultural Development Fund (CDF) Peer Learning Network, Five10Twelve has seen first hand the benefits of investing in heritage. Communities have been empowered, disused sites have been revitalised and local economies boosted, with fantastic heritage-focused case studies throughout England.

Levelling up fund

Perhaps unsurprisingly, both Pioneering Places and the CDF were funded through DCMS arms-length bodies, with the former funded through the joint National Lottery Heritage Fund (NLHF) and Arts Council England (ACE) Great Place Scheme initiative.

The Levelling Up Fund (LUF) is a departure from the usual DCMS investment route, with DLUHC now also recognising the value of investing in heritage and culture. This is explicit in the LUF prospectus, with chancellor Rishi Sunak acknowledging in the first few lines of his foreword that:

“upgrades in local heritage sites strengthen the local economy and build civic identity. These are things that people rely on every day in communities up and down the country - the infrastructure of everyday life”.

Successful heritage bids

21 of the 76 successful first round LUF bids in England, (28%), featured a significant component of heritage-led regeneration, although as Dr Sadie Watson noted during the recent #HeritageChat on Levelling Up, “you could argue cultural heritage plays a role in most of them”.

16 of these 21 heritage-forward projects also include a strong connection with culture, which was identified as one of three priority pillars for investment in the LUF prospectus. This once again highlights the strength of partnerships between heritage and the wider creative and cultural sectors, (see also The Heritage Alliance report, Inspiring Creativity).

Heritage + culture bids totalled £277m of the £1.35bn awarded in England, (20.48%), with predominantly heritage-only bids totalling £89m, (6.52%). It should be noted, however, that these are rough estimates based on the entire amount awarded to each project, while most of the bids include a mixture of investments across heritage, culture, town centre development and/or transport. Five10Twelve is currently awaiting a detailed breakdown from DLUHC showing exactly what percentage of each bid was allocated to which stream, after which we hope to update this blog with a more detailed analysis.

See also our previous blog for The Heritage Alliance on Heritage-led Regeneration and Cultural Placemaking.

Image: Creative Folkestone Triennial at Folkestone Gasworks. Image by Thierry Bal for Creative Folkestone.

What does Levelling Up mean for Heritage?

The view from the Association for Heritage Interpretation (AHI).

Damon Mahoney, AHI Trustee

AHI believe that interpretation of our natural and cultural heritage enriches lives through engaging emotions, enhancing experiences and deepening understanding of people, places, events and objects from the past and present.

We welcome any drive to encourage equity of opportunity for people and places to enable them to engage with and develop their heritage assets. The levelling up agenda as we understand it encourages investment in both people and places. Interpretation can be the crux of the understanding of heritage, whether built or cultural.

Investment in and around heritage assets provides huge benefits for people and communities, whether through employment and education opportunities in visitor focused developments, volunteering for people wishing to engage within their local community, help support wellbeing initiatives and be part of creating pride in community. Providing funding for so called ‘left behind’ places will potentially enable communities to take on more ownership and responsibility for their own heritage assets. Interpretation is a key part of this development. Our membership within the United Kingdom is geographically diverse and already lives and works within the communities that the levelling up agenda will potentially affect.

Investment in and around quality heritage asset visitor development encourages visitors within regional areas, this has additional benefits in money spent on accommodation and local services.

We hope the Levelling Up fund will provide the additional funding, which together with investment from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, will embolden local government to support natural and heritage assets to be opened up for the benefit of communities. Effective interpretive interventions within such projects will provide not only contract and employment opportunities for our membership but enable communities to discover and appreciate their local heritage assets.

We have seen through the high standard of entries to our Engaging People Awards this year that there is a huge appetite for communities to engage with and develop community assets, to preserve not only natural and built infrastructure but also cultural assets such as traditional skills and performance. The encouragement of pride in place, through the understanding of diverse heritage assets, and how that heritage informs and affects the present can help to build cohesive communities.

Effective interpretation provokes thoughts, relates to people’s lives and creates meaningful personal and community engagement with places that matter to people. We strongly advocate the benefits that the practice of interpretation brings to people and place. Our membership of professionals work in all aspects of heritage interpretation, facilitating understanding and meaning for communities and visitors alike.

If the levelling up agenda is placing people and place at the centre then our heritage, and the interpretation of it, is core to its success.

AHI will strive to be part of the levelling up conversation and a voice for our members.

Image: Dub London: Bassline of a City, © Museum of London.

A community led project to interpret the dub heritage of London. From its roots in Jamaican reggae to how it shaped communities over the last 50 years, Dub London explores not only dub music, but also the cultural and social impact it has had on the identity of London and its people.

What really is the purpose of my project?

Peter White, Director of Fresh Life Consulting

Many projects involving listed buildings are not primarily heritage projects. Yet their heritage can contribute substantially to their re-purposing, re-use or just future-proofing proposition. Common examples are former bank premises to bars and restaurants – their high end value enabling good quality conservation to take place. There are many other, less obvious examples, requiring grant aid to achieve viability, that have followed well-trodden lottery funded paths, which in recent times appear to be riskier and more drawn out. Without wishing to question the validity of the NLHF process, it is undeniable that there are too many applications for their funds to satisfy resulting in many of failing to be awarded Round 2 funding. This must be a shattering blow for those projects and its little comfort for them to know that all the studies and research undertaken during the development phase will stand them in good stead. If there’s no source of capital, I submit it’s more likely to leave them extremely frustrated and at a loss to know what more they can do.

This is where LUF grants are a boon. The government recognises the importance of heritage to placemaking and the revitalisation of our towns and cities and understand the value of well-founded heritage projects.

I’m currently project managing a project that was the subject of a successful NLHF Resilient Heritage project grant. We were all set to submit an EOI for a NLHF Capital Grant, knowing that we would also have to apply to others for the balance of funding over and above own resources and anticipating the whole process taking until ‘26/27 to complete assuming we would be successful first time around (a big assumption!). Then, just at the right moment, along came the LUF announcement.

It emphasised heritage, culture and town centre criteria as priorities. Our scheme is a listed Town Hall aiming to widen its cultural offer to better serve a diverse local population and upgrade its facilities to make them fit for purpose and transform the audience experience. And bring new footfall into the town centre. We decided to apply.

Primarily this is an arts and cultural scheme, not a heritage one. But it is vital that it’s restored and conserved to a high standard.

We were delighted to find we’d been successful when the first batch was announced in October. And we estimate we’ll save 30 months minimum from start to finish, on the process we were about to follow. Will we have lost out on all those studies we would otherwise have undertaken in the development period? I don’t think so. We’ve already prepared an ADP (kindly paid for by the AHF), Condition Survey/Conservation Plan and are directing resources that would have otherwise been spent on, in my view marginally beneficial but very expensive preliminary research, into conservation and high quality delivery. 30 months’ time saving will also save a shed load of money on building costs. What’s not to like?

Ask yourself: what really is the purpose of my project?

Image by Peter White.

Supporting Community Heritage: caring for collections in local museums

Sara Crofts - Chief Executive, Icon

Despite the explosion of online opportunities and digital engagement during the lockdowns the fundamental desire for the authentic experience of gazing at original artworks, admiring objects, and visiting historic places remains strong. Studies have shown that being permitted to touch historical objects, for example through museum handling sessions, fosters a sense of privilege and responsibility. This has been linked to building positive feelings of personal value and self-worth. Local museums and heritage centres are therefore vitally important to ensure that everyone has access to well cared for, thought-provoking, and life-affirming collections – on their doorstep.

Much of the nation’s cultural heritage is held in trust by smaller organisations, including regional museums and galleries. These much-loved and valuable institutions share the national responsibility to safeguard our cultural heritage even though many are run by volunteers or hard-pressed local authorities. Such places need ongoing support to keep the doors open and the lights on. We also need to invest in conservation skills so that the collections they hold can continue to be enjoyed by present and future generations. It is essential that collections care is adequately resourced so that we all have access to the tangible evidence of our past, regardless of where we live.

Why does this matter? Because conservation helps us understand ourselves and the world around us, which in turn helps us make better decisions about our future as we learn valuable lessons from our past. The benefits to society are far-reaching:

• Conservation supports diversity and inclusion: objects that are fully representative of the UK’s heritage can be conserved, displayed and interpreted.
• Conservation extends the lives of objects and show us how to care for our possessions, encouraging sustainability and countering a throwaway culture.
• Conservation enables a broader range of objects to be put on display, offering the potential to increase visits to heritage sites and museums.
• Conservation can help us live healthier and happier lives through creating opportunities to experience cultural heritage in meaningful ways.

Conservation is a core element of the work of cultural and heritage institutions – both large and small – and is one of three pillars that support the care of collections, alongside our fellow professionals in the curatorial and collections management disciplines. Each pillar offers distinct skills and brings a wealth of professional knowledge, expertise and judgement that can be harnessed to support positive outcomes in local places. Together we offer up our professional skills to identify, develop and implement new means of access and engagement that will help to build a stronger and brighter future for cultural heritage in the parts of the UK that need it most.

An investment in the future

Icon believes that conservation and collections care professionals have a role to play in delivering the levelling-up agenda but we need to ensure that there are sufficient skills and capacity within our local institutions. While the major institutions play a key leadership role, we still need to champion good practice and nurture high professional standards in regional and local museums. The fragile regional ecosystems of small conservation businesses also need to be supported, otherwise clients will find it increasingly difficult to source suitable professionals to undertake conservation projects. And lastly, we need to train the next generation of conservators to ensure the continuity of specialist knowledge and expertise.

Investing in conservation demonstrates that we care about our cultural heritage and that we welcome our duty to be responsible custodians. But it offers much more than simply safeguarding the past. Conservation is forward-looking and creative. Investing in conservation will support people and the heritage they care about as we embrace our post-COVID future.

Image by Sara Crofts.

The shape of stories

Owen Garling, Knowledge Transfer Facilitator - The Bennett Institute for Public Policy, University of Cambridge

Despite its lack of a clear definition, one of the characteristics of ‘levelling up’ that has been identified is its comparative nature – where needs levelling up, and what does it need to be levelled up with?

But what if we were to take a different approach? Rather than starting off by comparing different places, we could look at the story of places and see how they have evolved over time to reach the present day.

The American writer Kurt Vonnegut gave a lecture based on his 1981 autobiography, where he argued that all stories could be categorised by a small set of “simple shapes”. This idea was put to the test in 2016 by a group of researchers from the Universities of Vermont and Adelaide. The research used natural language processing to examine 1,327 works of fiction from Project Gutenberg’s fiction collection to see if there were common narrative structures at play and identified six “core emotional arcs” that explained the structure of the stories in their sample.

As well as explaining the common narrative arcs of stories, these six archetypes can be used to explain and share the narratives of places. Looking back over the past histories of different places and identifying which ‘story shape’ best applies, and at which stage they are at, may give any policies designed to ‘level up’ the best chance to succeed.

Using heritage in this way to think about how a place has developed can provide the opportunity for academics and policymakers to think differently about levelling up in a number of ways.

In much the same way as every person is unique, so is every place. Thinking about how places have developed over time helps us to think about them in a more nuanced way.

A sense of place can be rooted in the past. Tapping into the collective memory of places and their triumphs and challenges helps to turn levelling up from a centrally-driven series of policy pronouncements to a series of much richer conversations.

Places have a direction of travel. Thinking about levelling up in the context of the past, present and future helps to measure and understand the changes that are happening within a place. Some places may be at their lowest point, others may still be heading downwards, and some, hopefully, will be starting to see their fortunes recover.

Everywhere has its own assets. Looking at places over time shows how the availability of changing levels of resources can affect places. We’ve seen how the impact of the pandemic has varied across different places. How can stories of the past or present help to reimagine the future of these places?

Rather than asking what ‘Levelling Up’ means for heritage, perhaps we should be asking how heritage can help to put ‘Levelling Up’ in context for people and places. This is a question that we intend to continue exploring at the Bennett Institute.

Read “Levelling up: An Anthology”, edited by Owen Garling for the Bennett Institute for Public Policy.

Image: Photo by Akash Banerjee on Unsplash.