Welcome | The Architectural Heritage Fund

I am delighted to be introducing my first Annual Review as Chair of the AHF. It has been a hugely interesting first year in the role and one in which I have been able to properly appreciate the extent of the AHF’s work across the UK.

It has been incredibly useful meeting key partners and stakeholders and also making visits to some of the projects we have supported. A trip to Scotland over the summer included a visit to a number of hugely impressive projects, including Above Adventure in Kilmarnock. This project, supported by the AHF with all three core elements of its support – grants, loans and advice – has seen the rescue of Grange Free Church from dereliction and turn it into a popular, accessible climbing hub. This is very much an AHF project through and through: working within a deprived community to help bring forward an ambitious social enterprise led project for a redundant historic building. The creation of this new asset is also helping efforts to bring more footfall into the town centre and which demonstrates the wider impact projects like this can have.

It’s also been a pleasure to meet so many of our stakeholders and partners. Our partners are critical supporters and funders of our work and we continue to benefit from hugely important relationships across the heritage and social investment sectors. I would like to thank all our funders for their new and ongoing investments over the course of the year, including the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and the statutory agencies across the UK, the Department for Communities Northern Ireland, Historic England, Historic Environment Scotland and Cadw. We’re also immensely grateful for the ongoing support from foundation and trust supporters, including the Garfield Weston Foundation, Pilgrim Trust and William Grant Foundation.

It has been incredibly useful meeting key partners and stakeholders and also making visits to some of the projects we have supported.

Ros Kerslake CBE, Chair

Our partners are critical supporters and funders of our work and we continue to benefit from hugely important relationships across the heritage and social investment sectors.

Ros Kerslake CBE, Chair

I have been an admirer of the AHF for many years, but in the last year I have really understood the crucial role that it plays and the opportunities that exist for it to contribute yet more widely. Matthew and the team at the AHF do an amazing job supporting communities around the UK to realise their ambitions and I have been incredibly impressed by the quality of the work they deliver.

I want to say a thank-you to my fellow trustees who have all made me feel immensely welcome. We were sad to see Carole Anne-Davies retire from the Board during the year, but we have been lucky to replace her with such an experienced new trustee for Wales in Menna Jones. I look forward to working with Menna and the entire Board as we implement our new Strategy during the next year.

Ros Kerslake CBE

Chair

I have been an admirer of the AHF for many years, but in the last year I have really understood the crucial role that it plays and the opportunities that exist for it to contribute yet more widely.

Welcome from our Chief Executive

One of the big pieces of work we undertook this year was the interim evaluation of our 2020-23 strategy. This was a very positive piece of independent research for the organisation, with the organisation scoring highly across a range of metrics from our grant recipients and loan clients. One of those metrics was a rating of the support they had received from the AHF, on a scale of 0 to 100, with the average score coming out at 92/100. We see this as a strong endorsement not only for the work we do, but also of how we do it, and this underlines why we are signatories of the Institute of Voluntary Action Research’s ‘Flexible Funder’ commitments that aim to keep funders committed to ‘open and trusting’ funding practices.

The evaluation also highlighted areas of work where we need to develop our approach. This includes more intelligence-led targeting of areas and communities that have not, for whatever reason, benefitted from previous AHF investment. We have also undertaken work to re-develop our grant and loan assessment criteria to ensure decision-making better reflects considerations of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, and this was launched in time for our new funding awards, from April 2023 onwards. We also continue to work with partners to look at ways we can support the capacity of less well-resourced organisations to bring forward applications, particularly at the early stage.

Our £15.4m high streets programme, Transforming Places through Heritage, closed in March 2023. Despite the difficulties of delivering a programme like this during a pandemic, the evaluation of the programme has been very encouraging. The programme – which awarded 338 grants to 239 organisations focused on high street heritage-led regeneration – was found to have delivered significant value in town centres where the market is not working and where investment in social and community enterprise-led projects can make a real difference. We continue to make the case to government and other funders that this type of investment is both still very much needed across the UK and also delivers clear heritage, community and regeneration impacts.

That need for ongoing investment is one of the reasons we were so delighted to receive news of a new £5m grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to award to a further cohort of Heritage Development Trusts. The Heritage Development Trust pilot formed part of our Transforming Places through Heritage Programme and included investment in seven organisations across England. These organisations are all actively involved in developing portfolios of heritage assets within town centre and high street locations, filling gaps that are often left by the private and public sectors. We are very grateful to the Heritage Fund for this award and look forward to expanding the programme to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland during the next year.

Our new Strategy for 2023-28 sets out our ambitions to increase funding and support to charities and social enterprises to deliver across a range of priorities – from place-making to improving the energy efficiency of historic buildings. And despite all the challenges the UK currently faces, we remain optimistic about the role heritage-led regeneration can continue to play in communities across the UK.

Matthew Mckeague

Chief Executive

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