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Spotlight On: The Heritage Lottery Fund

Heritage Lottery Fund
Written by Roma Publications

Heritage Lottery Fund

The Heritage Lottery Fund is the largest dedicated funder of heritage projects in the UK since 1994. The organisation uses money raised by natural lottery players to help people across the United Kingdom explore, enjoy and protect the heritage they care about.

The Heritage Lottery Fund supports a variety of projects, as long as they make a lasting difference for heritage, people and communities. The public can use the funding to record the diverse stories of the community, breath new life into a historic park, create vibrant town centres and much more.

With £375million to invest each year, the Heritage Lottery Fund places emphasis on conserving historic buildings, documenting cultures and memories, transforming landscapes and encouraging care for wildlife.

The Heritage Lottery Fund supports projects that give historic buildings a new lease of life. Funding has helped to repair buildings as varied as London’s Brockwell Park lido and the last surviving court of back-to-back housing in Birmingham. With funding for conservation, you can repair and transform a historic building, give a historic place of worship a new lease of life, help volunteers try their hand at conservation, take a building off the buildings at risk register, regenerate a town centre and look after a local war memorial.

Community heritage can include memories of a local profession no longer practiced, a town’s connection with a historical figure or event, local myths and legends. The Heritage Lottery Fund supports projects that help local people delve into the heritage of their community, bringing people together and increasing the pride of the local area.

The Heritage Lottery Fund believes that cultural traditions, local dialects and family history makes us who we are, being as much part of our heritage as archaeology, historic buildings or natural landscapes. Projects which delve into diverse cultures and memories can bring people closer together, help them to discover each others heritage and create a sense of local pride. Funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund can help trace the origins of proverbs and sayings, record accounts of traditional farming methods and help people to understand the social and historical context of art forms such as dance, music and films.

The Heritage Lottery Fund is proud of the industrial history of the United Kingdom. From giving Richmond Train Station a new use to restoring the SS Great Britain, the funding celebrates the innovative buildings, transport and technology that helped shape the modern world.

‘Landscapes and natural heritage are under ever-increasing pressure but are vital to our future’, says the Heritage Lottery Fund. Habitats are being eroded, species lost and precious landscapes neglected. Landscapes and wildlife help to enrich our lives provide a sense of place and inspire future generations. The Heritage Lottery Fund is keen to encourage more fundable projects from the natural heritage sector; a sector that has attracted less funding in the past.

The association also work increasingly hard providing funding for archives, libraries, museums and galleries which hold our written, spoken and film heritage as well as object which tell our story. With funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, a community can work with other museums, libraries and archives to research their heritage acquire new objects and materials and ensure that collections in these places of heritage stay relevant to visitors.

For more information, or to gain Heritage Lottery Funding, please visit www.hlf.org.uk.

About the author

Roma Publications