The UK has heritage aplenty: 99 per cent of people in England live less than a mile from a listed asset. And people like it: The Repair Shop on BBC 1 had 6.7 million viewers in 2020. Responding to this interest by refocusing early intervention and prevention away from institutions overcomes systemic exclusion and helps people through mental illness’s bleak landscape. We meet participants in our heritage and mental-health projects through partnerships with inclusion support organisations like the Richmond Fellowship, or DIAL in Great BARRIERS TO HERITAGE AND MENTAL HEALTH COLLABORATIONS HERITAGE ASSET HOLDER MENTAL HEALTH PROVIDER Not core business Mental health is not core business for heritage organisations struggling to survive. Heritage looks like a luxury to mental-health services helping people in crisis. Lack of capacity Lack of capacity to make new partnerships, train staff, develop an effective programme, deliver it and evaluate the outcomes. Lack of capacity to engage in a new collaboration when the cost/benefit is not clearly identified. Lack of reliable funding Project funding is short term, and funded programmes that pre-exist the National Lottery Heritage Fund’s Wellbeing Outcome/Historic England’s Wellbeing and Heritage Strategy may not include costs for health and wellbeing. Funded projects come and go, so heritage organisations are perceived as unreliable partners. Therefore, heritage is not embedded in health-provider thinking at corporate or practitioner level. Lack of evidence Heritage and wellbeing are new areas of interest, so the sector lacks expertise and models of good practice on which to draw, and to share with decision makers. No research evidence of the benefits of heritage for mental health meets the standards required for making an intervention prescribable by the NHS. Lack of money Heritage organisations can not invest in activities that do not generate income, and social prescriptions are largely unfunded. Link workers seldom refer people to services that cost money to attend, so heritage may not appear on their list of signposting options. Lack of understanding Endemic discrimination and fear may play into a sense that working with people with mental illness is more trouble that it is worth. Heritage may be perceived as ‘not for us’, ‘not about us’. Staff may separate their own enjoyment of heritage from work, using it as an uncontaminated relief from emotional labour. Heritage linkworker Emily Cannell on the Lowestoft Scores Trail. Funded by Historic England, the project engages people who live in communities that are among the most deprived in England in Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft, and incorporates use of heritage action zones in both towns. (Photo: Darren France) Yarmouth. Their users are unlikely to visit historic places with an entry price of £14 (National Trust adult ticket) when basic Universal Credit is around £81 a week. People on low incomes are least likely to visit historic sites, but gain more wellbeing benefit than others when they do. The correlation between deprivation and mental illness suggests that many people living with mental health problems do not benefit as they could from heritage. There appears to be something distinctive in the interplay between heritage and creativity.We theorise that expanding imaginative, physical, intellectual and temporal space through highquality engagement with historic places and objects relieves the constriction of mental illness. As an ex-conservator, I am interested in the damage/repair analogy that emerges in conservation-based projects. However, benefits identified by heritage and wellbeing research largely overlap with those of green or creative activities by delivering on the New Economic Foundation’s five ways to wellbeing (connect, be active, be curious, keep learning and give),
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