16 CONTEXT 184 : JUNE 2025 were picked up in Judith Alfrey’s guidance on heritage impact assessment for Cadw. At a more strategic level, the work of Riki Therivel, Land Use Consultants (LAC) and CAG with English Heritage in the 1990s lives on in the methodology and thinking behind strategic environmental assessment. Value and values are central to appraisal and business cases, but currently heritage is not recognised in accounting as a form of capital alongside financial, human or even natural capital. Harman Sagger and the team at DCMS are leading the Culture and Heritage Capital initiative and new thinking about how heritage assets and activities might deliver services that can be valued. Meanwhile, central governments are looking at going beyond GDP to explore other ways of capturing value in public policy-making, particularly through ‘wellbeing’. This has emerged as an alternative to sustainability as an integrated policy-making framework through wellbeing frameworks in Wales, England and elsewhere. Perhaps because of the work of the HLF, the UK now leads the world in terms of research looking at the link between heritage and wellbeing. This year’s annual IHBC conference features a variety of emerging conservation thinkers who are exploring the links between heritage and wellbeing. Whose story? This account draws on personal memories of English Heritage and the Heritage Lottery Fund up to 2008, and a few of the people who most inspired me. Many others were part of the mix, encountered at early Association of Conservation Officers conferences or in the corridors of English Heritage in Savile Row. Writing about recent history is never easy, and no two people will remember events or even the figures involved in those events in the same way.1 There will be alternative views, and I hope others will tell their own stories. Inclusive, values-based practice often starts with looking for untold stories that challenge our established views of what is important. In 1983, Roz Langford spoke at an Australia ICOMOS conference entitled ‘Your Playground, Our Heritage’, in which she asked non-Indigenous heritage practitioners to understand different perspectives on the past. In 1989 Noongar activists set up camp at the Old Swan Brewery in Perth. The derelict buildings were on the site of Gooninup, a place of great significance to the Whadjuk people of the Swan River plain. Despite years of protest, and police violence, the building was eventually redeveloped as a cafe, restaurant, function centre and apartments. What may have been acceptable to one set of heritage interests was unacceptable to others. A Perth brewery may seem a long way from heritage conservation in the UK today, but Australian practitioners learned that heritage conservation is not, and never can be, a value-free exercise. In a world where cultural heritage was one of the first terms to be banned by an incoming US administration, being open to different views of heritage – without losing sight of our core technical and design thinking – is more important than ever. Kate Clark is an industrial archaeologist, with a career in heritage and museums in Wales, England and Australia. She has a special interest in inclusive, valuesbased approaches to heritage and is currently writing a dissertation on integrating heritage into wider public policy. The Old Swan Brewery in Perth, Western Australia, built in 1879, was the site of years of protest before being converted to a cafe, restaurant, function centre and apartments. (Photo: EuroVisionNim, Wikimedia) 1 A more detailed history of these policies can be found in three journal articles on Power of Place (2019), and the lessons from conservation planning (2023), and integrating nature and culture in the 1990s (2025). All were based on a paper archive documenting heritage policy in the UK and Australia from the late 1980s to 2008, containing many more untold stories.
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