Our Wellbeing and Heritage Strategy
On this page you can find a summary of the Wellbeing and Heritage Strategy for Historic England 2025-2030 and you can download the full strategy in PDF format.
What will this strategy achieve?
This strategy is a clear statement of our commitment to improving
lives through heritage. It offers a framework to connect people with
heritage in ways that enhance wellbeing.
Wellbeing can be supported in a broad sense through community environments, and in a targeted way by addressing unmet needs. This strategy aligns with our corporate goals and reflects our commitment to inclusion, diversity, and access. This strategy builds on three years of experience and outlines a five-year implementation plan.
We will:
- Remove barriers to participation and access to heritage, particularly for underserved communities.
- Expand opportunities to use heritage to tackle health inequalities Enhance people, power and place through heritage
- Support healthy environments by protecting and improving places and landscapes
- Build evidence about what works, for whom, and why.
Our work in wellbeing is a collaboration. All our progress to date has come from shared effort with partners. Going forward, we aim to learn and grow together, applying heritage to meet wellbeing challenges with focus and purpose.
What do we mean by wellbeing?
As per the What Works for Wellbeing Centre’s definition, “wellbeing is how we’re doing as individuals, communities and as a nation, and how sustainable that is for the future”.
Wellbeing is a ‘threat multiplier.’ If it is left unaddressed it will lead to greater inequality in education and opportunity, more poverty and more social and individual discontentment. These circumstances can have a negative impact on national health costs, growth, productivity and
security — and most crucially people’s health and
social trust.
Wellbeing is complex, values based, dynamic and multi-faceted– but two relevant aspects are explained below:
These are the factors that contribute towards a person’s potential for wellbeing and their ability to flourish. They apply at the individual level (lifestyle factors), the collective level (how well a community is doing) and the population level (wider socioeconomic conditions) and can often be objective.
This is an individual’s own cognitive and affective evaluation of their life. It includes our health and emotional resilience, our supportive social relationships and our feeling of relevance and social justice; at the highest level, this is about how well we feel we are doing in our own lives. Wellbeing in this context is personal and subjective,
and universally relevant. There are multiple opportunities within the cultural heritage sector to support these two key aspects of wellbeing. Our role is to show how heritage can be instrumental to national wellbeing.
How does heritage help?
This strategy is grounded in one core belief: heritage helps.
- Fosters identity and belonging
- Increases life-satisfaction
- Builds mental resilience and skills
- Counters loneliness and encourages trust
- Supports creativity, movement, and reflection
- It strengthens connections within communities
- It links us to our collective stories and inspires pride of place
- And it’s everywhere — accessible and personal to everyone.
Heritage is more than buildings or artifacts. It includes the stories, memories, and traditions that shape our lives. Because it is everywhere and meaningful to everyone, heritage can play a powerful role in improving wellbeing.
We believe:
- Heritage is opportunity: for creativity connection, and personal growth
- Heritage is personal: it meets individuals where they are.
- Heritage is universal: everyone can benefit from engagement with place and the past.
By seeing heritage through a wellbeing lens, we can unlock its full potential to improve lives.
Wellbeing relates both to how individuals and communities feel and operate. It can be protected and enhanced. Meaning it can be supported at a population and community level by providing the environment and enablers for a healthy life, and it can be a way to address social inequalities through considering particular benefits for those with unmet needs or struggling through systemic inequity.
We will articulate the following through our work:
- Protecting and enhancing places: Heritage enablers for the protective factors for health and wellbeing
- Addressing community needs: Heritage-led approaches to addressing health and wellbeing inequalities.
Together this approach will show how heritage can be instrumental to national wellbeing.
Vision
Everyone experiences the wellbeing benefits of heritage.
In order to achieve this mission we will facilitate the role of heritage in benefitting the wellbeing of more people in a better way. We are here to protect and revitalise the historic environment because it contributes to quality of place and connects us to others.
Objectives
Increase the connection between people and place through our delivery.
We’ve begun integrating wellbeing into our operations — from grants to projects — but there’s more to do.
We will:
- Amplify our wellbeing impact by understanding needs in people and places to show how heritage investment delivers public benefit
- Expand opportunities through building insight and embedded evaluation practices.
Priority activities:
- Community and place-based work: exploring the application of people-centred approaches
- Exemplars: Proof of concepts and working models of how wellbeing can support and develop our delivery
- Operational practice: Demonstrating collective wellbeing outcomes in community-led delivery and working with opportunities in systems and practices
- Social impact evaluation: testing evidence gathering to refine and build data.
Create and expand our understanding of heritage-led wellbeing through evidence.
The evidence linking heritage and wellbeing has grown quickly. We will now focus on making more of what we have and on evidence gaps — to be articulated with the new Historic England research agenda — with real-world impact and through evaluation.
We will:
- Understand how place quality, care, and identity support population wellbeing, including pride, belonging, and cohesion and how to address barriers to access
- Explore heritage activities and assets to study how heritage-based activities and skills and heritage assets support health, particularly fort hose most in need.
Priority activities:
- Connection to place: explore why places are
important through emotional connection - Character of place: how historic environments
and their role in place provide protective factors
for health - Skills and growth: how education and skills are
developed by heritage - Heritage for health: how specific programmes
work best for particular health needs.
Harness the power of heritage to enrich
communities and foster wellbeing to create a
lasting positive impact.
We’ve seen how heritage can shift perceptions— such as through our work with the National Academy of Social Prescribing. Now, we need to
demonstrate impact in new and evolving contexts.
We will:
- Advocate for heritage as a vehicle for wellbeing and capacity to influence policy through leadership and best practice
- Facilitate and strengthen partnerships across sectors, build networks and sector skills to increase the availability and reach of heritage-led wellbeing work.
Priority activities:
- Policy development: creating bodies of evidence applicable to major policy areas and historic environment priorities
- Leadership: showcasing work with others to promote our role in leading on how heritagesupports wellbeing
- Sector support: collaborative working with the heritage sector to maximise our collective offer and evidence base and support social prescribing
- Relationships: Building new partnerships to expand knowledge and building understanding of the public value of heritage especially in health and wellbeing organisations.
Context
Improving wellbeing means understanding people and place. We must advocate a ‘people and heritage-led’ approach guided by current social
needs. We will work with the heritage sector to articulate the benefits of heritage in these four areas through the work set out in our three aims –that is the opportunities provided by our work and that by the heritage sector.
For each there is the potential to look at how heritage and the historic environment can contribute to a supportive environment that helps
our life satisfaction and wellbeing (protective factors) and how it can be designed and tailored to meet particular needs within communities
(response to community need).
As we all work to consider wellbeing, we can consider a three-tier wellbeing model aimed to help with planning the aims and objectives of projects and programmes – it is a tool for considering how to work and where to make a difference. This enables work by us and others to be intentional and focused and helps design evaluations from the outset by linking it to clear objectives.
- Thriving: when we are thriving, we have the capacity to feel, think, and act in ways that enhance our ability to enjoy life and deal with the challenges we face. Thriving people have the potential to flourish. Thriving is usually associated with a positive sense of emotional and spiritual wellbeing and personal dignity.
- Surviving: when we are surviving, we are managing to continue to exist despite difficult circumstances. But we can build capacity
with support, in areas that will make the most difference to us. - Struggling: when we are struggling, people or things may be making it difficult to succeed despite our efforts. We associate struggling with longer-term, more complex situations. People who may, at some point, struggle are those most at risk of systemic inequity.
Different contexts require different approaches. Awareness of place, history, and circumstance will shape how we act.
Strategic priority areas
Loneliness and mental health are deeply intertwined issues and can occur across the life course.
Evidence exists that mental health and social connection can be supported through interaction with places and active participation with heritage.
Protective factors: Actively participating in heritage promotes active, connected, and curious living — strengthening mental resilience and trust. Good design in places and cultural memory can support people and reduce isolation.
Response to community need: Heritage supports mental wellbeing across diverse groups and settings. Individuals and
groups facing high levels of loneliness can be supported better through heritage; participation can reduce isolation.
Disadvantage gaps emerge early and persist; they impact education and life satisfaction. Young people with mental health conditions are nearly five times more likely to be economically inactive compared to others.
Heritage can help young people thrive —through building resilience, creativity, and self-determination.
- Protective factors: Schools, Youth Justice, and social programmes can embed heritage to support wellbeing, while local spaces like parks, skateparks and community spaces are vital for enabling opportunities.
- Response to need: Tailored provision for young people, for example those facing disadvantage.
Healthy life expectancy is more than 18 years lower for the most deprived compared to the least deprived areas.
Minoritised groups still experience the most significant disadvantage across multiple domains.
Meaningful heritage activities can create new opportunities and resources for people with lived experience of inequality.
- Protective factors: Embedding opportunities through heritage into existing systems can dismantle complex barriers caused by
structural inequality - Response to need: Bespoke approaches can best support groups with shared experiences, whether through homelessness, living with disabilities or other forms of marginalisation.
Trust in neighbourhoods has declined and 69% of respondents in a recent independent poll believe communities are more divided now than 10 years ago.
Social capital, cultural expression, shared values and belonging are known and important connective factors to support healthy communities. Heritage can support communities strengthen their
connection to place and feelings of belonging – enabling people to tell their stories, build trust, and
shape their environments.
- Protective factors: Involvement in heritage and planning decisions can build civic agency and pride of place
- Response to need: Co-produced heritage projects can support community connection through inclusive narratives.
Download the full strategy
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