Newcastle University

Project:

Assessing the Importance and Value of Historic Buildings to Young People

From February 2010 to October 2010
Project Leader(s): David Bradley
Staff: Mike Coombes, Andrew Newman (Arts and Cultures)
Contact: David Bradley
Sponsors: English Heritage
Partners: Bradley Research and Consulting

The study assessed the importance and value of historic buildings to 800 young people attending 16 state maintained schools in different parts of England.  The project  furthered our understanding of the relationships between young people’s sense of place and the historic built environment.
 
This project aimed to get a far richer understanding of the relationships between sense of place and being interested in and/or living in more historic built environments:

• What types of buildings, parks and monuments are important to what types of teenagers?
• What buildings, monuments and parks do young people think make their area special or unique?
• Where are the buildings, parks and monuments teenagers perceive to be important located in relation to where they live?
• Over how big an area are these buildings? (what are the spatial ‘footprints’ of teenagers )
• Why are these buildings important or valued? – is it their distinctiveness, prominence, aesthetic quality, age, historical significance, emotional attachment, recent use by the teenager