Heritage is Open!

The incredible St Lawrence Jewry, the location of our stall in London on 21 September

September is the month when heritage is open! It’s the month when cultural destinations put in extra effort to make heritage more accessible by opening up usually closed buildings, adding extra activities to their usual offer and making paid-for destinations free to enter. This is because a number of national and local initiatives centred on unlocking heritage for a wider audience take place in September. Heritage Open Days, Open Doors Oxford and Open House Festival (London) all create a bumper few weeks of encouraging people to get out there and experience the heritage around them.

Needless to say it was something the Historic Towns Trust wanted to be a part of. Over the course of the month we partnered with a range of institutions across the country to tell more people about our published and yet-to-be published maps.

Showing our maps and telling attendees about our upcoming Ipswich map, at our Ipswich event on 7 September

We held stalls in London, Oxford, York, Ipswich and Ripon, to show our publications to a local audience. It was also a great opportunity to promote our upcoming publications, such as Ripon (October 2024) and Ipswich (Summer 2025). Each event sparked conversation, gave us a great sense of what people love about our maps and the general enthusiasm for local history and heritage.

‘I love maps!’ was probably the most uttered phrase at each one of our stalls across the country. Over the month, we spoke to over 1000 people about our work, sold a host of maps and ignited local interest for our future publications. But for us, it was the chance to meet a new audience of people who hadn’t heard of us before or seen our publications that was the most rewarding.

Attendees discuss our source material for the Ripon map (to be published in October 2024), at Ripon Library on 13 September

There’s nothing better than seeing someone discover one of our publications for the first time and picking through the layers of history that they show. And how rare it is – nowadays – that people have the pleasure of unfolding a physical map, tracing their finger across the page to discover a previously-unknown-to-them medieval wall, vanished waterway or textile mill, that existed right where they are standing.

We want to do more of these activities to ignite a passion for local history across England, Scotland and Wales. If you would like to support us with our work you can donate here or hear more about what we plan to achieve with our work, please contact Martin Wills at development@historictownstrust.uk or see our Support Us document.