Everyday Heritage Grants

What is the grant available for?

The Everyday Heritage Grant projects will help to further our collective understanding of the past. They are designed to build on Historic England’s commitment to inclusion, diversity, and equality of opportunity in all our work. You can find out more in our Strategy for Inclusion, Diversity, and Equality.

The grants are for projects that focus on heritage connecting people to historic places, specifically those people and places that are overlooked or underrepresented.

Building on the success of the first round of Everyday Heritage Grants in 2022, and the second round in 2023, Historic England continue to be interested in projects that celebrate working class histories and the historic places that make up everyday life.

In the previous rounds of Everyday Heritage Grants, the majority of the applications received, and the projects funded were based in large urban areas.

To address this, in the third round, Historic England will only be funding projects about buildings and places in rural and coastal locations.

For rural locations, the building or place must be in a location with fewer than approximately 10,000 people living there.

Locations might include hamlets and isolated dwellings, villages, small towns, farmland, and unfarmed landscapes such as moorland.

For coastal locations, the building or place must be within approximately 1 kilometre of a coastline.

By building or place:

• a building or series of buildings or structures
• a site like a park, farm, street, neighbourhood, estate, archaeological site, or shipwreck
• the former site of any of the above

The grant will not fund projects that:

• are national (such as ‘a history of farming in England’)
• cover a whole region (such as ‘the shipbuilding industry in the North East’)
• are about a whole city (such as ‘social clubs of Plymouth’)

The buildings or places do not need to be listed for applications to be eligible for a grant. By listed, we mean any building or place which is protected, either by Historic England, or on a local list.

We want to fund projects that recognise and/or celebrate:

• Places where ordinary people work and live
• Working class communities
• Work and workers
• People from lower socio-economic backgrounds
• Heritage related to places with low social mobility
• Leisure and pastimes for working class people
• Social housing
• Industrial heritage
• Community heritage

The projects must:

• have co-creation at their centre
• allow people to share overlooked or untold stories of the places they live, work, and play in creative ways
• encourage communities and local people to learn more about their local historic places and tell their own stories about them in their own ways
• contribute positively to participants’ wellbeing and/or health
• address barriers faced by local people when engaging in heritage projects
• help Historic England to broaden the public’s understanding and knowledge of different types of heritage, and to promote enjoyment of local heritage

✔ Grant recipients must co-create the work with relevant communities; we value the process as much as the outcome

✔ The product and the process must have accessibility at their core, applications should demonstrate consideration of disabilities and other barriers to access

The outputs or products of the project should be decided with the community you co-create the project with. In previous rounds, Everyday Heritage Grants project outputs have included: murals and public artworks, oral history collections, documentaries and films, musicals and songs, poetry and other written responses, community gardens, skills-building workshops.

In addition to any outputs your co-creators might decide on, we will also require:

• A case study of your project: up to 750 words, we will provide a template for this, we may use your case study on our Inclusive Heritage Advice Hub
• Five high-quality images of your project: the images should show people engaging with your project with the correct permissions, we will provide model release form templates for this, these images may be used by HE to promote future Everyday Heritage Grants and other inclusive heritage projects.
• Evaluation data: this should be the data from a participant survey, we will provide a survey and guidance for conducting this, you should aim to survey all active participants in the project, this number will vary from project to project.

Any eligibility criteria

✔ All organisations are eligible to apply including community interest groups, charities, and local authorities. Individuals can apply if they are registered as sole traders.

✔ We are especially interested in applications from groups and individuals that are not heritage organisations but can deliver heritage projects. While we are willing to fund proposals with links to established heritage institutions, we are especially interested in funding community-led projects.

✔ We are particularly interested in supporting projects that represent diverse and minority ethnic communities, LGBTQ+ people and disabled and neurodiverse people.

✔ We will consider applications from previous Everyday Heritage Grants recipients, providing the project is not an extension or continuation of the previously funded project. Applicants will need to work on a new project, celebrating a different story and place, ideally with different outcomes or approaches.

✔ Previous unsuccessful applicants are also welcome to apply but projects will need to take into account the changes to the criteria for this round.

x Please note these grants are not designed to fund reinterpretation of museum collections, but rather are to fund projects to uncover people’s stories in relation to buildings or places. The buildings or places do not need to be listed for applications to be eligible for a grant. By listed, we mean any building or place which is protected, either by Historic England or on a local list.

x These grants are not for capital work – by capital work, we mean construction, modifications, or renovations to the structure of a building or place

x We will not fund any projects where the only outcome is a book or other printed publication.

Use this checklist to ensure your project is eligible.

• Does your project relate to working class histories?
• Does your project have a strong connection to place?
• Is your project based on a building or place in a rural or coastal location?
• Will your project cost up to £25,000? Please note we are also looking to fund several smaller projects under £10,000.
• Does your project centre around co-creation?
• Does your project take into consideration barriers to access and how to overcome these?
• Will your project have a positive impact on participants?

What grant amounts are available?

• Everyday Heritage Grants have a total budget of £500,000 for this work
• Proposals for projects with costs of up to £25,000 but we are particularly keen to fund a number of smaller projects up to £10,000 will be accepted
• Projects at a lower cost will not automatically be looked at more favourably, the overall strength of the project is the key factor
• No match funding required, but partnership funding or in-kind/volunteer contributions are encouraged
• Please don’t add contingency to your budget. Possible contingencies should be identified in the risk log and necessary funds can be applied for later via Historic England’s Variation Request process

Who provides the grant?

Historic England

How to apply for the grant?

To apply or to find out more information please click here.