Our objectives

In Scotland, our strong relationships with Historic Environment Scotland and the William Grant Foundation continued. We were able to make many additional awards thanks to a generous in-year uplift of £200,000 from Historic Environment Scotland. Funding awards helped us to support a number of community asset and town-centre regeneration projects, including a new loan to Jedburgh Community Trust’s Port House project that will help fund the regeneration of the Port House into a multi-use office and co-working space for the town’s social enterprise and not-for-profit organisations.

Additional funding of £270,000 from the Department of Communities’ Historic Environment Division through its COVID-19 Culture, Arts, Languages and Heritage Fund allowed the AHF to support a wide range of valuable community and heritage-led regeneration projects across Northern Ireland, aiding the recovery and renewal phase. Led by a diverse group of charities and social enterprises, the funded projects were all focused on the short- and long-term revival of Northern Ireland’s villages, towns and cities through the reuse of heritage assets. One of the awards went to North Belfast Working Men’s Club, helping it fund urgent roof repairs to allow it to continue serving the community of one of the UK’s most deprived wards. 

The AHF itself was also generously supported by a £2m investment from the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, through Historic England. One million of this funding was for the distribution of business planning grants to organisations impacted by the crisis, while another million has supported our endowment for lending, specifically focused on addressing bad debt that arises due to the COVID-19 crisis. We are very grateful for this support.

We funded a range of exciting high street projects, including Nudge Community Builders in their development of the Millennium Building in Union Street Plymouth. Nudge is seeking to bring it back into use as a cultural and creative space that supports the local economy and which will help ‘make Union Street a street the whole world loves’. A number of ‘Transformational Capital Project Grants’ were also awarded, including to the Heritage Development Trust, Valley Heritage, for the L&Y project in Bacup town centre. The project will see the creation of new co-working spaces and supported housing for local young people at risk of homelessness in a magnificent former bank building. Through our partnership with Coops UK, Power to Change and the Community Shares Booster, we also supported investments into a number of community share offers, including the Exchange in Erith for the transformation of the former town centre library into a space for community led programmes and the community buy out of the Railway Inn in Saffron Walden.

Although the intended launch of the Open High Streets programme had to be cancelled due to COVID-19, the programme partnership of Heritage Trust Network, Locality and Stir to Action managed to deliver seven online events during the year and later this autumn will see the re-launch of in-person events.

Despite a slowdown in the first quarter as people were adjusting to the first lockdown, new loan applications began to come forward later in the year and the Heritage Impact Fund reached the significant milestone of having made £5m in offers since its launch in 2019.

Among the loans made during the year was one to Grizedale Arts to help them purchase the Farmer’s Arms pub in the Lake District. An important Grade II-listed former coaching inn, Grizedale Art’s vision will see it become a new arts space, workshop and visitor accommodation, whilst at the same time incorporating its role as a community pub. The project offers an exciting new type of pub format for this rural community, one that could potentially be replicated and adapted within other locations.  

In Jedburgh, in the Scottish Borders, we were pleased to support Jedburgh Community Trust’s Port House project. Formed in 2002, Jedburgh Community Trust is a charity working to support the economic development of the town and save local heritage buildings for use by the community. A £100,000 loan is helping them in transforming a Category A-listed three-story architectural gem into a community resource centre.

In Wales there was further focus on heritage-led regeneration of key town-centre buildings, including the Grade II* Cardigan Markethall. The AHF is assisting by providing cashflow finance during the delivery phase of modernisation and restoration, through a loan of £200,000 from our Heritage Impact Fund (HIF). Amongst other elements, these improvements will support the development of the Upper Market area into a food court celebrating Welsh produce and culinary offerings and will improve trading facilities by introducing incubator units and pop up spaces.  

We actively worked alongside our partners during the year, including the statutory agencies within the four parts of the UK. We were able to help distribute emergency and additional funds (on top of existing budgets) that had become available as a result of COVID-19. Despite the challenges, the experience has helped to strengthen our relationships with key funders across the UK. In the case of Cadw in Wales, we believe our partnership during this critical time helped make the case for further investment into   social enterprise and heritage-led regeneration projects.

Despite the demands of delivering emergency funding, we continued to look at strengthening our internal systems and processes. This included ongoing work to improve our grants and loans database and updating our health and safety policy and risk assessments in light of the pandemic.  We also signed the Institute of Voluntary Action Research’s eight ‘flexible funder’ commitments, which set out how we will work to simplify our funding requirements and ease the administrative burden faced by charities and social enterprises applying to us for funding.

Three new trustees were appointed to the Board during the year, they are:

• Neal Shasore – Head of School and CEO of London School of Architecture
• Carole-Anne Davies – CEO of Design Commission for Wales
• Greg Pickup – CEO of Heritage Lincolnshire

Each brings significant experience across the fields of architecture, design and community-led heritage regeneration.

The AHF website now hosts twenty-seven individual case studies of projects we have supported or are currently supporting, with fifteen new ones produced during the year. These include early-stage projects such as Provision House in Dudley and the completed British Linen Bank building in Glasgow, each providing a snapshot into different projects and buildings and the organisations behind them. Studies such as these play a vital role in providing valuable insights into how organisations have gone about the process of regenerating historic buildings, and we will continue to publish new studies over the next year.

We continue to make the case for innovative aspects of our work, particularly to government and partner funders, including the Heritage Development Trust programme. This initiative supports the development of sustainable social enterprise property developers with a focus on heritage assets. The Heritage Development Trust pilot is currently funded through the Transforming Places through Heritage programme but has scope to be delivered across the UK. 2020-21 included developing a film on HDTs and planning an event to highlight the potential of the model in supporting the levelling up agenda and a range of place based regeneration initiatives across the UK.