Baroness Andrews is Parliamentary Under secretary of State at the Department for Communities and Local Government gave the keynote speech of this morning.
Your Place or Mine is a challenging question:
- How do we capture our common heritage?
There is only one answer to the question, it is “our place.”
‘There is a great importance with the sectors work to broaden the sense of heritage and what it means to others.’
‘Heritage has wonderful power to create prosperous communities.’
Our notion of heritage has become more inclusive, but how do we make it reflect the communities that make up this diverse country we live in? There is passion across communities to develop and talk about a sense of:
- Where do we belong?
- How do we build on this together?
Heritage cannot be owned by one class or culture. We have a shared history. But where
better to talk about some the issues than Manchester, with its rich past and involvement in the industrial revolution? It’s a knowledge and cultural capital with a rich future. She continues to speak of the regeneration and housing projects that have taken place and are currently under way in the city.
The Baroness concludes by providing an example of an underprivileged area of Birmingham that has been regenerated through a community project and has seen a strong sense of social cohesion and pride in the community’s heritage since.
Click to download a brief soundbite from Baroness Andrews of press play below:
To download a transcript of Baroness Andrew’s speech, click here.
I think that building a community in order to build up consciousness about heritage is great, but education has got a role to play as well. It is important to teach our kids about the values of our heritage, and provide them with the keys to understand it.
Thanks for your thoughts there, Emmanuel!! What does everyone else think? Is he along the right lines?
This has been an inspirational conference, and when thinking of true inclusivity, and the idea of “Your Place or Mine” I was particularly inspired by the Tyntesfield story: National Trust, as told by Carola Vorlop in the Working with Volunteers
Workshop. This carefully and creatively conceived project works with people with mental illness and learning disabilities. Mental illness is often an “invisible” aspect of people’s lives, and as such maybe we need to strive to make more effort to reach out to engage people who have special difficulties in making contact with us. It did make me consider if we could have all learned much from a representative
for Mental Health on our conference panel dscussions.