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Heritage and Identity - Who do we think we are?
Press Release

The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) today launched a major national debate about national identity in the UK and the role of heritage within it.

At the Who do we think we are? forum, held at the British Museum today, experts and commentators including Prof Paul Gilroy, Billy Bragg, Melvyn Bragg and Phillip Dodd outlined the role of heritage in identity, looking at world views, community views and exploring issues associated with painful heritage and the media's treatment of heritage and history. The Heritage Lottery Fund also reported on research into public views of heritage including findings from two citizen's juries held recently to explore why heritage matters to people individually and collectively.

The discussion – attended by more than 300 delegates from the fields of heritage, culture, central government and social science – is intended to stimulate a national debate about notions of heritage and its role in today's society. Further discussions from the on-line forum associated with the event involved indigenous language, whether there really is a 'British' culture, whether the memory of World War II dominates our sense of history and how children with 'mixed heritage' can be supported in celebrating their own identities.

Liz Forgan, Chair of the Heritage Lottery Fund, commented on the importance of creating a shared understanding for the communities that make up our society:

'A common understanding of where we have come from and who we all are, is the glue that holds communities together. If heritage and identity are ignored, communities can start to fall apart as this sense of collective significance dissipates or retreats into aggressive tribal parodies.'

Who do we think we are? marks a commitment to debate and discussion about heritage and identity in the UK by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Next on the agenda will be a series of events to explore heritage in Wales culminating in a major event in Cardiff on 3 November.

HLF announces cultural partnership in Thames Gateway development

At the conference, Liz Forgan also revealed details of the Heritage Lottery Fund's involvement in one of the most ambitious housing and regeneration schemes in Europe – the Thames Gateway.

Building on the Fund's work with citizen's to date, she announced that HLF, working with Arts Council England East and other regional cultural organisations, will jointly begin involving local people in exploring options for cultural priorities, provision and conservation within Thames Gateway area. The first project will be with young people already living in the Gateway, exploring what they value there and would like to see in the future.

The purpose of the scheme is to ensure that the needs and identities of existing communities in the area are not forgotten in the process of the massive expansion programme. Liz Forgan stressed that the development and expansion should not be at the expense of the communities living in the Thames Gateway now; that the desperate need for housing should not short-circuit the need for care to be taken to build sustainable, cohesive communities.

The Thames Gateway project will start work in autumn 2004.