15-Minute Heritage

You may not have a castle or abbey next door but, if you live in Wales, you’re always within at most 15 minutes of a part of our wonderful Welsh heritage. Judith Alfrey, Head of Regeneration and Conservation, talks about Cadw’s quest to reconnect everyone with the heritage on our doorsteps.

The lockdown imposed in response to COVID-19 was a powerful reminder of the value and importance of the local environment to communities. Lessening travel, it served to reconnect people with their local area and, in many cases, strengthened the sense of community. It brought home the idea of the 15-Minute City, a planning concept through which everyone can meet most of their needs within just a short walk from their home — that the daily necessities and the services that support well-being are all within easy reach.

This concept has inspired us to think that everyone should be able to benefit from heritage within a 15-minute walk from their front door, whether they live in a town, city or the countryside. It may not always be recognised, but heritage is a vital component of every local environment and Cadw would like to help people to use it to strengthen their attachment to where they live.

To do this, we have launched an initiative called 15-Minute Heritage to encourage people to step outside and discover the heritage on their doorstep. Not everyone has a castle, a scheduled monument or a listed building nearby, but everywhere has heritage that is local and personal. Every single neighbourhood has been made and shaped by the people who have lived and worked there and every place takes on meaning from the ways in which people have experienced it and related to it.

As the initiative unfolds, we hope to offer many more routes to encountering heritage in different forms and in unexpected places. To start with, we want to make it easier for people to find out about the listed buildings, scheduled monuments and historic parks and gardens on their doorstep. Therefore, we will be adding a new search facility to Cof Cymru, our online database of historic assets in Wales — bit.ly/CofCymru. Users will be able to identify all designated assets within a set radius of any given address.

We also want to explore and share alternative ways of looking at heritage in very different places. To do this, we are using StoryMap, a proprietary web-based platform, which uses maps combined with narrative text, images and other media to create digital stories of place. We hope that these stories will inspire people to look with new eyes at what is around them.

Our first StoryMap is about Bedwas, Caerphilly. Bedwas is not particularly noted for its heritage, but a close look at its buildings reveals a fascinating story. Its listed buildings provide snapshots of its origins as a medieval settlement through to its growth as a mining community in the twentieth century. However, it was through its unlisted buildings that we discovered the kind of place that Bedwas became: prosperity and ambition are reflected in the quality of its commercial and public buildings; a distinctive architectural identity was created out of small variations in the design, materials and detail of housing built around 1900; and there are excellent examples of the kinds of public housing built in the aftermath of both World Wars.

We have also created a StoryMap for Pembroke Dock. Here, we look through the lens of Unloved Heritage?, a project funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund to encourage young people to get involved with heritage. The project focused on the kinds of features which often don’t get much attention — not castles and ancient sites but the more recent heritage which is part of the make-up of the ordinary places in which most of us live. Pembroke Dock’s StoryMap invites us to look at the town’s remarkable history through the eyes of the young people who call it home.

In future, we will also be using StoryMap to explore the heritage of rural neighbourhoods, where landscape features and monuments, milk-churn stands and mileposts tell their own stories. We’ll also be looking closely at the 15-minute heritage of some of our own sites — for example, what’s on the doorstep of a castle or a bishop’s palace?

Other ways in which we hope to encourage participation in the initiative includes a new package for schools and home learning called 15-Minute Heritage: History Detective Mission. This invites children to investigate the history on their doorstep and to come up with ways of sharing their findings within their local community.

StoryMap, a digital platform, is used to explore the local heritage of Bedwas, Caerphilly, and uses a combination of narrative text, images and maps to shed light on the history of the town. Pictured is the Big Shop, Hillside Terrace (top), the White Hart Inn (middle) and the Cornish Houses (bottom).

Working in partnership with Cadw, the National Lottery Heritage Fund has also launched a 15-Minute Heritage grant scheme as a contribution to recovery from COVID-19. Its aim is to enable third-sector organisations, community groups and museums to lead small-scale projects that will help to connect communities with their local heritage through place. Places have their own history, but they also accumulate significance to different groups and generations in different ways. We want the projects supported through the scheme to find ways of sharing these diverse meanings and interpretations.

The value of local heritage is recognised right across our sector and, in the months ahead, Cadw will be working closely with our partners in pursuit of a common ambition to put it firmly on the map.

There are heritage stories on all our thresholds. We would like to invite you to think about what makes up your 15-minute heritage. Tell us about one thing that captures your sense of heritage in your neighbourhood and we will endeavour to publish your contributions in future issues of Heritage in Wales — email your heritage story, together with a photo if you have one, to cadwmarketing@gov.wales

Above: Participants in the Unloved Heritage? project spent a day learning about photography and photographic development techniques last summer. They captured creative images of historic buildings in Pembroke Dock, including the Pembroke Dock Heritage Centre — formerly the Dockyard Chapel — built in 1830. Right: A late eighteenth-century milestone at Pont Maentwrog, Gwynedd, is an example of the heritage to be found in rural neighbourhoods. © Crown Copyright: RCAHMW