Abstract
Geographies of health challenge researchers to attend to the positive effects of occupying, creating and using all kinds of spaces, including ‘green space’ and more recently ‘blue space’. Attention to the spaces of community-based heritage conservation has largely gone unexplored within the health geography literature. This paper examines the personal motivations and impacts associated with people's growing interest in local heritage groups. It draws on questionnaires and interviews from a recent study with such groups and a conceptual mapping of their routes and flows. The findings reveal a rich array of positive benefits on the participants' social wellbeing with/in the community. These include personal enrichment, social learning, satisfaction from sharing the heritage products with others, and less anxiety about the present. These positive effects were tempered by needing to face and overcome challenging effects associated with running the projects thus opening up an extension to health-enabling spaces debates.
Highlights
The geographies of health have explored the varying therapeutic effects of occupying, using and creating a myriad of spaces including parks and woodlands (‘green spaces’) (Milligan and Bingley, 2007), yoga centres and other ‘new energy’ spaces (Conradson, 2010), men's sheds (Milligan et al, 2015) as well as spas and other ‘blue spaces’ (Foley and Kisterman, 2015; Kearns et al, 2014)
In the UK, much of this work is undertaken with the help of the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), some groups are self-sufficient from monies made from their heritage products sold
The HLF grants help cover the costs of bringing people together to undertake a heritage project and produce the heritage products to share amongst the wider community
Summary
The geographies of health have explored the varying therapeutic effects of occupying, using and creating a myriad of spaces including parks and woodlands (‘green spaces’) (Milligan and Bingley, 2007), yoga centres and other ‘new energy’ spaces (Conradson, 2010), men's sheds (Milligan et al, 2015) as well as spas and other ‘blue spaces’ (Foley and Kisterman, 2015; Kearns et al, 2014). Little is known about the potential health benefits people can accrue from participating in community-based heritage conservation. Community-based heritage conservation is often but not exclusively driven by the involvement of older people, many groups try to involve younger adults and schools as well. Lundgren (2010) found that older people often refer to their accumulation of life experiences in accounts of ‘how it was’ to explain their view on today's society. Another potential reason could be that older people have stronger connections with their local place, as found by Beaumont (2013). For the purposes of our study, we examined health primarily as a state of social wellbeing, derived from a sense of involvement with other people and with our communities (a core component of the WHO definition of health), we understand that this is complexly interrelated with physical and mental wellbeing (for example, from walking with other people)
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