About Us

Launch of the Middlegate Community Garden Heritage is for everyone and we want to encourage as wide an audience as possible to get involved with, learn about and care for the history that surrounds them. The Outreach Department was set up in August 2003 to run community based projects which get new audiences actively involved in the historic environment through creative projects looking at local history.

Our projects, which we run in partnership with local organisations, promote a sense of place and identity and increase skills and confidence in the people who take part.  Our focus is on engaging people from ethnic minorities, people on lower incomes, young people, and people with disabilities. 

A major part of our work is working with the Civic Trust on Heritage Open Days to encourage new organisers to take part to reflect England’s diverse histories.

The Outreach Team works on about 40 projects across the country per year, involving over 20,000 people. Visit our Outreach Projects pages to see examples of projects around the country.

All the outreach projects meet particular local needs but they all have some features in common:

1. Grass-roots engagement with the historic environment – all projects are developed collaboratively with local communities to meet their needs.
2. Partnership with local bodies – projects are embedded locally by working with partner organisations, from local councils to arts and regeneration bodies, to develop high quality, relevant projects, and to maximise resources.
3. Sustainability – sustainability is built in from the outset, for example providing skills that can be used after the project has ended or putting in place structures that will allow the work developed in the project to be continued after EH involvement has ended
4. Evaluation – each project is evaluated to assess the impact that these new projects have on the communities with whom we work, as well on English Heritage as a whole.