Whose Heritage?

Our learners' forum has been working on a heritage project for the whole of Scotland and have spent over two years getting the project ready. Today though, we had an afternoon of asking ourselves many questions:

What constitutes ‘heritage’? How is it viewed, valued, measured and interpreted? Does appreciating and contributing to heritage depend on social and economic status, cultural or ethnic background or upon geographic location?

What we see of heritage, the way it is identified and the way we use it is, is it contrived?

What do we protect? Who decides what is worth keeping? Who is it meant for?

We all agreed though that there are popular conceptions and expectations of what heritage is, and should be, and that inevitably, the buildings and sites that are selected, and the process for their selection, are based on power – and who controls and owns it.

Who decides, for example, that certain buildings have heritage value? Who decides what is worth keeping? Who is it meant for?

These decisions are often in the hands of people who have benefitted most from our heritage, so our last questions for the day had to be what does heritage mean for you and is it the preserve of the middle classes?

Whose right is it to determine our heritage anyway?

And what better place to contemplate, in a place of great heritage, or is it?