LI Partnership Award

The Northern Heartlands project (2017-20) was funded under the Great Place Scheme by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) - now the National Lottery Heritage Fund - with Arts Council England and Historic England. It was one of sixteen Great Place Scheme pilot projects with the Northern Heartlands team winning £1.5 million over a three year period from June 2017. The project aimed to help people reconnect with their landscape, its nature and cultural heritage. The implementation team facilitated this reconnection by working with a wide range of partners and commissioned artists who acted primarily as creative facilitators on a myriad of projects engaging communities across the area to understand how their place has evolved over time and what they think is special now. This was about using the landscape and place as a medium to understand what people value in a proactive way rather than reacting to specific drivers of change, which can sometimes result in reactions often labelled as ‘NIMBY’.

It was also about understanding that many communities feel left out of decision-making processes relating to many aspects of their lives, including local landscape policy. The participatory methods revealed and articulated a ‘community nous’ in such a way that it helped to translate local knowledge, meanings and values of the places, landscapes and communities into information that could be used by a range of policy and other stakeholders to influence longer term polices, strategies and plans.

The innovative landscape approach which formed the conceptual basis for the project emerged as a result of a collaboration between professionals and academics from different disciplinary areas. The approach focused on revealing the existing and potential relationships between people and place and placed people and their values at the heart of the project. Landscape professionals and researchers often work with projects which help bring together a wide range of partners, stakeholders, interests and communities who come together through their common interests in landscapes and this idea of positive commonality of interests and common resources is used in many different contexts including sustainable development and global policy making.

The development of the landscape approach focus in the Northern Heartlands project came from two key directions embedded within the knowledge, understanding and experience of the four initial instigators of the project, Graham Young, Ewan Allinson, Gary Charlton and Maggie Roe. The following narrative provides a description of the development of this approach and the importance of both personal collaboration and how the coming together of key people led to the development of an extensive partnership that coalesced around the Northern Heartlands project and developed as the project was implemented.