As well as our own funds, we were able to bring forward applications to the Social Investment Business-led ‘Thrive Together Fund’. The £6m fund, which launched in July 2023, is managed by Social Investment Business and delivered in partnership with Co-operative and Community Finance, Fredericks Foundation, Groundwork, Homeless Link and the AHF. It combines grant funding with repayable finance, providing a funding package of loan (75%) and grant (25%) to eligible small- and medium-sized charities and social enterprises that are improving people’s lives, or the environment in which they live, in England. The first award overseen by the AHF was made to Leigh Building Preservation Trust; this was for £150,000 and will help the organisation grow operations at the Grade II* Leigh Spinners Mill.

Thanks to generous new support from the Garfield Weston Foundation, we were able to continue our advice and early-stage grants to heritage and community-led regeneration projects in Northern Ireland. This new funding, which began in 2023 and will run to 2026, supports the Harnessing Heritage programme, our open fund in Northern Ireland. In addition to Harnessing Heritage, we have also seen the continuation of the Village Catalyst programme, which now has fifteen projects in its pipeline. This programme saw the completion of a further pilot programme capital scheme, Murphy’s on Main Street, a long-vacant category B1 building, that is now a well-being hub and workspace for the village.

In Scotland, we continued to award a range of early-stage grants thanks to generous funding from Historic Environment Scotland and our ongoing partnership with the William Grant Foundation. These awards included £20,000 for North East Scotland Preservation Trust for two buildings in Portsoy that have been bequeathed to that Trust and for which it is developing proposals. The initial schemes involve developing the buildings as Portsoy Creative Hub – to comprise artist’s studios, a gallery, and space for arts and crafts workshops.

Portsoy harbour, Aberdeenshire. Photo credit: Paul Higson

The past year also saw the completion of several projects that have received long-standing support from the AHF, including Above Adventure in Kilmarnock. In 2015, early-stage funding assisted with the cost of a feasibility study, with two further project development grants awarded in 2016 and 2018 to assist with the cost of design team fees. The project also benefited from two separate social investment loan offers totalling over £200,000, which helped enable both an initial meanwhile use phase in the church hall and the ultimate delivery of the full large-scale capital project. The AHF was also able to introduce the project to other private funders, who helped with further funding.

Town centre projects were also a feature of our awards in Wales, where, thanks to generous funding from Cadw, we continued to see a significant uplift in our investments. These included a Project Development Grant to Elysium Arts to advance plans to bring the former JT Morgan department store back into use to support charities and creative industries in Swansea. Another long-standing feature of our work in Wales has been our funding of community-run historic pubs. This year was no different with a £13,200 grant awarded to Tafarn Yr Eagles to help transition the pub into community ownership.

At the UK-wide level, we awarded funding to 12 UK organisations through our new £5 million Heritage Development Trust programme. From places as geographically spread as Caernarfon, Chatham, Derry/Londonderry, this scheme will create new organisations and extend the scope of existing organisations to breathe new life into their disused and at-risk historic buildings. The funding is part of a new partnership between us and the National Lottery Heritage Fund, to expand our Heritage Development Trust model across the UK following the success of the pilot programme in England.

We continued to provide advice and support through the RePlan business support service. By year end, this service has supported 13 organisations with a range of development needs. Each organisation is first offered a diagnostic to understand the work they need to carry out, and further focused support is then provided by the AHF’s network of expert consultants.

As well as the funding to the individual Heritage Development Trusts, we enabled the cohort of existing and new HDTs to act as a peer learning group to each other and have provided training opportunities based on their needs. The full network met for the first time in February 2024 at Stretford Public Hall in Greater Manchester, and an ongoing series of UK-wide events and capacity building workshops are supporting them to develop as organisations and deliver increased impact in their areas of operation.

In our role as one of the delivery partners for the UK-wide Community Ownership Fund, we have supported projects seeking to take ownership of and develop sustainable uses for a range of historic buildings. In total, 48 projects supported by the AHF either through early-stage grants, loans, or through the COF delivery partnership, have now been awarded funding through this programme.

The Wales section of the report documented the significant increase in funding we had delivered compared with the previous three-year period, and how this was helping more organisations to deliver heritage and community-led regeneration – including many projects around community-owned historic pubs and chapels, both pressing priorities for the country in terms of finding new uses. In both countries, significant new funding had been allocated to AHF programmes, partly as a result of our demonstration of the impact of heritage and community-led regeneration in cities, towns and villages throughout Wales and Northern Ireland.

Following the final year of the Transforming Places programme report and the publication of the externally produced evaluation report, we produced our own summary evaluation report. This provided qualitative and case study evidence to sit alongside the more data driven report (which had found that the programme would return £3.38 in value for every £1 invested) and detailed how case study projects have delivered against the five critical success factors of the programme. These case studies included Real Ideas CIC’s conservation and adaptation of Liskeard Library, which demonstrates the range of regeneration benefits being brought to the local area, which is in the top 10% most deprived wards in the country.

In Scotland, we began the process of drawing together evidence of the impact of our work in preparation for our funding bid to Historic Environment Scotland in late 2024. This recently published evaluation undertook a series of interviews with key sector stakeholders and a representative sampling of project teams supported by AHF grants and loans to examine the impact of our advice and funding on project progression. Focusing on the five-year period from 2019-2024, the report finds that we play a critical role in the development and delivery of projects of heritage-regeneration projects, as well as within the broader funding and support ecosystem.