The latest figures for heritage participation have been released by the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) and cover the period of April 2014 to March 2015, noting that ‘74.4 per cent of adults had engaged with heritage in some way in the last year’.
The data covers regional and national cultural participation data across England, and also looks at regional trends in each sector (arts, heritage, museums and galleries, libraries, archives, volunteering and special events) as well as equalities data relating to trends in visits and digital participation.
In the chapter on heritage (p16) DCMS writes:
Key findings:
- In the year to March 2015 over seven in ten adults (73%) had visited a heritage site at least once in the previous 12 months. A statistically significant increase since the survey began in 2005/06 (70%) and since 2010/11 (71%) but a similar rate to all years since.
- Participation rates for heritage across most of the nine English regions remained at a similar level to 2005/06 with the exception of the North East, North West and West Midlands where attendance increased from 69 per cent, 68 per cent and 66 per cent respectively in 2005/06 to 77 per cent, 73 per cent and 71 per cent respectively in the latest results.
- Nearly three in five adults belonging to black and minority ethnic groups (56%) visited a heritage site at least once in the past 12 months. This was a similar rate to 2013/14 and an increase of almost 6 percentage points since 2005/06 (51%).
Download the key findings report
View a summary infographic of the heritage data
