Built Heritage
We are the Built Heritage research group, based in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at Manchester Metropolitan University. We attend to the living heritage of historic environments, reveal their hidden stories, think by hand, and turn fieldwork into policy.
Our research is underpinned by four commitments
Attending to living heritage
Living heritage is the craft knowledge, rituals, festivals, and everyday cultural practices that keep historic places an ongoing concern. In our theory, our groundwork and our national policy work, we treat it as inseparable from fabric, and we hold living heritage and the built environment in the same hand.
Revealing hidden stories
Living heritage is the craft knowledge, rituals, festivals, and everyday cultural practices that keep historic places an ongoing concern. In our theory, our groundwork and our national policy work, we treat it as inseparable from fabric, and we hold living heritage and the built environment in the same hand.
Thinking by hand
Drawing, notation, model-making, film, and sound recording are how we do research. We also put pencils, clay, and paper into the hands of the people we work with, because making loosens conversation in ways a seminar room cannot. We let word and image work together to catch what either alone would miss about a historic place.
Turning groundwork into policy
Our research starts on foot and in the middle of things. Through oral histories, archives, workshops, and active listening, we capture insights that carry upwards into national evidence bases, guidance, and professional frameworks. We believe the distance between a walking tour and national policy is shorter than most people think.