Musings on the Heritage Creates 2025 Report from The Heritage Alliance
At Tangram, we’re interested in the ways culture, people and place intersect, and few places tell that story more powerfully than our heritage sites.
The latest report from The Heritage Alliance (Heritage Creates, 2025), chaired by the wonderful Carole Souter CBE (who I was lucky enough to work under at the National Lottery Heritage Fund) is a timely reminder that heritage isn’t just about preservation. It’s about participation and potential.
The report asks us to pay attention to the places, people and partnerships shaping our cultural future.
As Carole, rightly opens “It’s more important now than ever that we demonstrate the potential of heritage and the creative industries to bring communities together, improve our wellbeing and shape a shared cultural legacy to be proud of.”
Heritage spaces and creative industries – examples in best practice
The report is structured around key themes - heritage as host, muse, practice, and through innovative and inclusive partnerships - goes beyond advocacy. It gives us real, grounded examples of what’s actually working.
Take Alice Billing House in Stratford, once a neglected fire station, now home to affordable artist studios, crucially with long leases offered in perpetuity, and a vibrant community arts programme, thanks to Creative Land Trust. Or the Piece Hall in Halifax, once a Georgian cloth hall, now one of the country’s leading live music venues. These impressive transformations are lessons in long-term thinking, resilience and vision.
Closer to home for some of us at Tangram is the case of Croydon’s Music Heritage Trail and exhibition, a brilliant project curated by our friend and peer Jen Kavanagh for the Museum of Croydon. As part of Croydon’s year as London Borough of Culture, this project brought together community voices, historic music venues, digital innovation and local pride to create a trail that is as immersive as it is celebratory, highlighting the borough’s rich musical legacy, from dubstep and punk to classical and folk. It’s a perfect example of how heritage, when placed in the hands of communities, becomes a living, breathing thing informing identity, boosting local pride and inviting wider participation.
What’s striking across all these case studies is how heritage is shown as a clear economic driver (with businesses in listed buildings generating 4.4% higher GVA), and as infrastructure for innovation. The report captures how heritage sites are being used as spaces for immersive tech, fashion sustainability, youth training and health intervention with everything from Cathedrals transformed by light installations to Rotherham’s Creative Producer programme at Wentworth Woodhouse.
It’s also clear that intangible heritage (crafts, practices, skills) is getting the recognition it deserves. Projects like the Modern Artisan programme, developed by The King’s Foundation and Net-a-Porter, show how historic influence and high-quality craft can coexist with carbon-neutral, future-facing design. The York Minster Centre of Excellence is a standout model for how heritage estates can be future proofed through skills, research and global collaboration.
What matters most
Perhaps what matters most for us at Tangram is the report’s emphasis on inclusive partnerships. These case studies show what happens when heritage organisations work hand-in-hand with artists, educators, social enterprises and communities. They offer practical ways to address the still prevalent inequalities in access, representation and opportunity across the sector.
And they prove something we hold central in our work, that heritage and a place’s ‘culture’ is not static, or at least it shouldn’t be. It is a dynamic, living resource that, when used thoughtfully, can shape identity, invite participation, and support a more connected and creative society that benefits us all.