C O N T E X T 1 7 3 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 2 21 DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION their pasts, however, this conventional facade is revealed to be skin-deep. All citizens need to see their pasts reflected in our national story. We have seen a welcome shift towards openness around LGBTQ+ histories in heritage since the mid-2010s, aided by changing social attitudes, equalities legislation, and the actions of individual curators and some national institutions. From the beginning of the 2000s, New Labour governments encouraged the cultural sector to address the issue of social inclusion. Some organisations took the opportunity to include LGBT people and histories among those which had been under-represented. This process was encouraged by the equalities legislation of 1997–2010, especially the Civil Partnership Act 2004, culminating in the Equality Act 2010, which directed public bodies to actively promote the equality of groups of people with various characteristics, including ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender reassignment’. The heritage sector remained very cautious, however, and it was the actions of two major national bodies, the government agency for the historic environment Historic England and the voluntary sector National Trust that helped to change practices from 2015–16. Between 2015–16 I led the special project ‘Pride of Place: England’s LGBTQ+ heritage’, commissioned by Historic England with a team of social historians, urban planners and architectural historians. With a focus on public engagement and social media, one of Historic England’s aims was to ‘create a permanent record of buildings associated with LGBTQ+ history which will be accessible to the heritage sector and the public as a whole’. The main achievements of Pride of Place continue to be available online to the public and heritage practitioners. They include new and amended list descriptions (that is, national heritage designation) for selected LGBTQ+-related sites, and a crowd-sourced interactive online map which identifies queer buildings and places across England. There is also an extensive, 35-page online exhibition on LGBTQ+ history and heritage, teachers’ resources for secondary schools and a DIY guide for the public on how to go about researching and protecting queer places at a local level. For Pride of Place we defined ‘queer heritage’ as incorporating homes and public places where people acted on their same-sex love and desire for each other; places where they crossed gender to pass as the opposite sex; buildings where courageous individuals organised politically to change homophobic laws; and sites of commemoration of same-sex love. We included elite buildings and everyday places, those recognisable as conventional heritage sites, and others relevant to LGBTQ+ history in popular memory, including places that were no longer extant. In this way, Pride of Place emphasised the materiality of place as a repository of queer Sissinghurst, Kent. Its famous garden was made by Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, both widely known to have had numerous same-sex relationships. (Photo: Alison Oram)
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