IHBC welcomes £55M heritage-specific funding for high streets, but highlights how holistic benefits merit more investment as ‘healthy high streets mean healthy – and happy – people’!

Posted on 02/11/2018 by IHBC NewsBlog
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townscape plus peopleThe IHBC has welcomed the suite of heritage-specific funding in the budget, notably £55M for England’s pressured High Streets, but cautions that the holistic benefits of heritage are not yet being fully recognised in these figures, especially when ‘healthy high streets mean healthy – and happy – people’!

image by Fiona Newton

Andrew Shepherd said ‘Any new money for the sector is always to be welcomed, and both these initiatives will undoubtedly be spent very quickly!  And with these two leads, of Historic England (HE) and the Architectural Heritage Fund (AHF), I’m sure the funds will be used as successfully as previous investment’.

IHBC Director Seán O’Reilly said: ‘While the allocations are welcome and desperately needed, you have to wonder if we really are getting across the full message about the diverse and holistic benefits brought by the simple care, skilled conservation and informed management of our historic and traditional places and buildings’.

‘Healthy High Streets mean healthy – and happy – people, because everyone can benefit from this kind of investment!’

‘This investment mitigates Climate Change through reducing building waste and the carbon inefficiencies inherent in so much new construction’.

‘That same money brings improvements in health, through the inherent pedestrian-friendliness of traditional building and urban layouts’.

‘As investment, it also underpins economic diversification and sustainability too, which inevitably leads to more secure – and happier – people’.

‘So – great though it all is – we must also ask if the dedication of the £55M to these sectors really is offering proportionate recognition to the potential gains on offer from our unique, globally admired, but terribly threatened heritage resources.’

New funding and opportunities in the budget will be reported on separately in the IHBC’s NewsBlogs, while the headline investments referred to here include:

  • £40M to help restore historic high street properties through Historic England’s Heritage Action Zone initiatives
  • £15M to communities resources to put historic buildings back into economic use, to be supported by the Architectural Heritage Fund.

Other allocations include:

  • Commitment to fund £120M towards the UK Festival of Innovation and Creativity.
  • Investing £8.5M in Coventry City of Culture 2021
  • Providing 1.7M support for local communities for the First World War and Holocaust commemoration (£1.7 million).

For more background see Budget documents at:

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