Celebrating our historic assets and local identity is a key step in developing a sustainable visitor economy, bringing more life back to our high streets, encouraging more tourism, but also recognising and promoting local pride.

Capturing history and conveying it to others should be a fundamental part of how we manage changing historic cities, towns, villages, neighbourhoods, streets and buildings. Exemplary heritage interpretation can be the difference between a place being overlooked and neglected, or it becoming a new attraction and a source of enjoyment and education for many different people.

These small and interactive webinar-workshops will be led by Sarah Oswald of the Authentic Spark, an experienced heritage interpretation expert and member of the Association of Heritage Interpretation (AHI) and Group for Education in Museums (GEM). We will consider how to celebrate built and social heritage, and for places not usually thought of for their heritage value.

Aimed at professionals and communities alike, this is an important practical next step in helping to revitalise places and bringing heritage assets alive for visitors and local communities.

These webinar-workshops are designed to support delegates in developing a new heritage interpretation strategy or rethinking an existing strategy, and so you will be encouraged to consider your own project to work on during and between the sessions.  If you are commissioning others to produce a heritage interpretation strategy, this will be an essential guide on what to consider at each stage.

Delegates will learn about:

• what interpretation is, why it matters and the principles behind it
• identifying audiences and setting objectives
• building an interpretive plan
• undertaking an interpretive audit of existing interpretation material
• developing interpretive messages, and
• choosing the right media appropriate to different audiences, places and messages.