'You Can't Move History. You Can Secure the Future': Engaging Youth in Cultural Heritage

'You Can't Move History. You Can Secure the Future' is a tag line used by the Long Live South Bank (LLSB) campaign to encapsulate a distinctive heritage claim aimed at retaining the informal skate spot in the Undercroft on London's South Bank. The campaign will provide the basis for a critical investigation of young people's involvement in heritage issues with the aim of learning how we can promote a positive approach to a more plural conceptualisation of heritage. Until now, the involvement of youth in heritage debates has typically been as part of a rhetorical strategy that serves to speak for them as future stakeholders; as in 'we are preserving the heritage for future generations'. The ongoing LLSB campaign, however, demonstrates youth as highly engaged political subjects capable of defining their own heritages as part of their own claims to urban space.

In response to the AHRC's Care for the Future theme, this project explores the changing means by which particular forms and uses of the built environment become seen as so valuable that they deserve protection for the benefit of future generations, with the LLSB campaign viewed as a pathfinder in this regard. Efforts to conserve the historic environment in the UK are faced by a shift away from traditional sources of legitimacy based on consensual and universal definitions of what counts as heritage towards more recognition of the diverse ways in which different communities may engage with and value their local environment. This pluralisation of heritage presents opportunities for the formal recognition of previously marginalised heritages. Research is therefore needed if we are to understand the inter-relationships between (sub) cultural groups and their local environment. Furthermore, we need to build on existing literature on how conservation communicates values and practices across generations to ask whether traditional conservation approaches and tools continue to be appropriate for the new forms of cultural heritage they may be applied to.

Employing expertise across the fields of History, Town Planning, Media Studies and Sociology, this project will analyse the long-running and ongoing political, economic and cultural struggles over the use and significance of the Southbank site. We will work with the youth filmmaking collective Brazen Bunch to record walking interviews and oral histories with LLSB, Coin Street Community Builders and the Twentieth Century Society, all of whom have indicated their willingness to participate in the project. We will take the same approach to engaging with a range of other stakeholders including BMX bikers, photographers and graffiti artists. This material will be analysed alongside LLSB campaign documents and films; official and alternative plans and planning documents; and print media and film archives, resulting in two journal articles to be published in key media/cultural studies and heritage journals utilising this case study to challenge dominant assumptions about youth's engagement with heritage issues in the past and present, and making recommendations on how youth might be engaged in caring for their future. The footage will also be edited, with the Brazen Bunch filmmakers, into a short film that will be used to engage key heritage and planning organisations in a workshop discussion about the ways in which young people relate to heritage. We will work with the Heritage Lottery Fund to place the findings of the Southbank Undercroft into the context of their innovative 'Young Roots' programme by drawing out key themes and debating them at the workshop. This will then form the basis of a report in which the key findings of the Undercroft and Young Roots will be considered alongside existing academic and policy literatures to suggest ways in which young people's involvement in heritage could be further incorporated in the formal heritage system.

This project bid has developed in conjunction with our non-HEI collaborators Brazen Bunch (a film company) and our project partners, the Heritage Lottery Fund and will involve research with the members of the Long Live South Bank campaign. It seeks engagement with four distinct communities of interest; young people, community film makers, heritage organisations and wider local communities. These groups will benefit from this research in a number of interconnected ways.

Firstly, the Southbank Undercroft project is designed to uncover young people's attachments to historic spaces by making connections between their experience of space and the value attributed by heritage organisations to their spatial experiences. It will examine the insider/outsider dynamics constructed through the bottom up/top down discourses produced by Long Live South Bank campaigners and heritage organisations concerned with preserving sites of architectural/historic value. In doing so it will explore the politics of recognition in such a way as to contribute to the understandings of the social actors implicated in this particular conflict and also to youth campaigner more widely.

Secondly, this project will impact upon the creative industries, particularly those that aim to celebrate a diversity of cultural heritages. It will enable community film makers to explore the meanings and attachments young people - past and present - have ascribed to the Undercroft site through their use of subcultural discourses, and therefore contribute to shifting understandings of heritage and youth engagement. The film and the online exhibition produced by researchers and collaborators will benefit individuals and institution involved in debates about the future of the Undercroft as well as other grass roots campaigners and more traditional heritage organisations

Thirdly, this project is constructed in such a way as to contribute to presently under articulated aspects of heritage policy making; namely the participation of young people and the relationship between tangible and intangible heritage. The film will establish a starting point for discussion of these issues which will then be consolidated in a report designed to capture the debate between all the relevant stakeholders, including English Heritage, the Royal Town Planning Institute, Twentieth Century Society, Institute for Building Conservation, Royal Institute for British Architects and the Architectural Foundation. This report will seek to engage with the emerging priorities outlined in the heritage and urban planning sectors as demonstrated by the new National Heritage Protection Plan (consultations 2014) and National Planning Policy Framework (2012) and are detailed in the case for support and pathways to impact.

Finally, this project will engage with local community organisations such as Coin Street Community Builder through the workshop, and the wider general public through the online exhibition. The attendance of community groups and the wider interested public at the workshop in which the film is presented will help us to examine young people's attachment to historic spaces and the relationship between tangible and intangible heritage within a socio-cultural context. It will break up a debate that could become polarised into an us/them binary and ensure that unexpected discourses can also be heard.
Each of these communities of interest is directly involved and impacted by the research project either through conducting the research or through the final event workshop and report. Taken together they will develop a better understanding of youth engagement in heritage debates and establish a more inclusive understanding of the ways in which cultural and political citizenship is articulated.