Herefordshire’s A Great Place

Logo indicating support from Arts Council England, funded by lottery, with a stylized hand and text highlighting public funding support.

Joint Heritage Lottery Fund and Arts Council England funding for Herefordshire’s a Great Place was secured by the Herefordshire Cultural Partnership. Support has also come from Herefordshire Council, Elmley Foundation, EF Bulmer Benevolent Fund, the Becket Bulmer Fund, and Friends of Herefordshire Museums & Arts. 

The Great Place project empowered communities to redefine what makes Herefordshire a great place, while championing and strengthening the vital role culture and heritage plays in a rural county’s social and economic future.

A woman is being interviewed in front of a floral background with a vintage sofa. A man is taking notes or reading papers, and a cameraman is filming with a professional video camera. Another person is holding audio equipment nearby, all inside a well-decorated room with natural light.

About

Over the course of three years, the Great Place team worked with diverse communities, volunteers, and arts and heritage professionals to put culture at the heart of life in Herefordshire.

The ambitious cultural development project, co-funded by Arts Council England (ACE) and Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) and supported by Historic England, aimed to:

  • Get more people taking part in arts and heritage through a series of public events, workshops and an annual culture conference.

  • Explore and support new ideas through the creation of new grant schemes and the backing of cultural community asset transfers.

  • Help Herefordshire’s cultural organisations be more resilient through the provision of new information and new tools, such as a culture website for the county.

  • Strengthen the links between culture, health and wellbeing, and the economy through new partnerships and working groups.

In June 2018, Great Place hosted Civic Fabric 2018 – Herefordshire’s first national culture conference. 

The project also included:

  • Go and see bursaries: funding research trips to pioneering arts or heritage sites around the UK

  • My Place grants: for communities to commission artists to create new work

  • Workshops for those working on the front line of cultural delivery

  • Discovery labs giving residents the chance to try out creative activities

  • Cultural apprenticeships

  • The launch of a brand new culture website

The project also worked with the Hereford-based Brightspace Foundation to explore the smart use of open data; with Herefordshire Council and others to support successful community takeovers of assets for cultural use; and with the tourism, education, health and wellbeing sectors to make sure arts and heritage play an integral role in the overall economic and social growth of the county.