Heritage Lottery Fund 

The Heritage Lottery Fund supports a wide range of projects involving the local, regional and national heritage of the United Kingdom. The Fund aims to support projects designed to care for heritage and help people experience it, such as building repairs and conservation, buying items, land or buildings which are important to our heritage, those designed to increase learning about our heritage, increase participation or involve volunteers and the local community.

The Heritage Lottery fund runs several different programs:

Web Site

Your Heritage

This program offers grants of between £5000 and £50,000 for projects that care for heritage or increase people's understanding and enjoyment of it. Projects should make it easier for people to gain access to heritage and benefit the community and wider public. This program is intended to increase the Fund's support for a broader range of heritage, and has a much simpler application form that that for 'Heritage Grants.'

Heritage Grants

The Heritage Grants program offers grants of £50,000 or more to organisations which aim to look after and enhance the UK's heritage, increase involvement and improve access to and enjoyment of heritage activities. Projects may relate to e.g. nature conservation, historic buildings, museum or archive collections, spoken history records, cultural traditions or transport or maritime history.

There are also Project Planning Grants available to help in the early stages of projects, which may lead to an application for a Heritage Grant.

The Greater York Community Archaeology Project is funded under the Heritage Grants scheme.

Repair grants for places of worship

In Partnership with English Heritage, there is a special grant program for repair grants for places of worship in England. The scheme is for urgent repairs to grade I, II*, or II listed places of worship. The focus of the scheme is normally for single projects costing less than £200,000. The Heritage Lottery Fund welcomes applications for projects other than urgent fabric repairs concerning places of worship under their other grants program as long as you can meet their requirements.

Townscape Heritage Initiative

This initiative provides grants of between £250,000 and £2million for projects to regenerate the historic environment in towns and cities. The program is designed to address problems in areas of social and economic need and aims to repair the buildings which make up the architectural character of historic urban areas and bring derelict and under-used historic buildings back into practical use.

Parks for People

This initiative is to help restore historic parks and gardens. The aim of the programme is to improve landscapes by restoring, regenerating and improving sites so that they can be enjoyed by local communities. Projects should enhance public access and also open up heritage resources and sites to the widest possible audience.

Landscape partnerships

The program is to promote heritage conservation as part of rural regeneration. This initiative allows partnerships representing a range of Heritage and community interests to tackle the needs if landscapes, whose various elements may be owned by different people. The program is aimed at applications based around a range of projects, which when combined will provide a varied package of benefits to an area, it's communities and visitors. Areas must have a strong landscape identity.

Young Roots

Young Roots promotes the involvement of young people, aged 13 to 20 years old, in their heritage. Grants of £5000 to £25,000 are available for projects, delivered through partnerships e.g. youth organisations, that increase opportunities for young people to learn about heritage, promote involvement and a greater appreciation of the value of heritage for a wide range of young people.

Contact:

Carlton Tower

34 St Paul’s Street

Leeds, LS1 2QB

Tel: 0113 3888030

Fax: 0113 3888031

E-mail: y&hdevelopment@hlf.org.uk

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