Heritage Works, the celebrated Manchester-based Building Preservation Trust (BPT), has announced the closure of its office, noting that ‘If there is any issue that you might wish to pursue or steps that you consider could be taken to sustain Heritage Works as a staffed organisation, then please do make contact as soon as possible.’
Chairman John Glester writes:
For the past few years the Trustees and staff of Heritage Works have been striving to create a sustainable base upon which the organisation could work with its range of partners to meet its charitable objectives. These are two-fold: to preserve the built heritage, particularly those buildings whose conservation and re-use will contribute to the regeneration of their locality and to promote the public’s awareness and appreciation of the historic environment and the processes involved in building conservation and regeneration.
As with any other Building Preservation Trust the income which sustains Heritage Works is mainly derived from undertaking projects and whilst there have been many reviews, appraisals and studies into potential projects commissioned and funded by partners over the past few years, collectively the income to the Trust has been insufficient to cover the costs of employing the staff and the associated office costs. Heritage Works recently submitted a significant application to the Heritage Lottery Fund in relation to Everton Library in Liverpool, which had it been successful would, together with other funded activities, have utilised and funded a significant part of the current infrastructure.
With the failure of the Everton Library bid (albeit with an expectation that a revised submission will be made), Trustees cannot see the income streams over the next year that would enable Heritage Works to retain its offices and employed staff. Therefore Trustees consider that they have no option now other than to close the offices at the end of October this year and regrettably make the current staff redundant by that date. All of our immediate commitments will be completed by that time.
Heritage Works as an organisation will continue, but the Trustees’ ability to drive matters forward will be severely limited without our staff. This is particularly frustrating since there is a raft of projects on which we have been working which will either fail or be dangerously delayed.
If there is any issue that you might wish to pursue or steps that you consider could be taken to sustain Heritage Works as a staffed organisation, then please do make contact as soon as possible. Needless to say this is now a very urgent matter.
Despite this sad news, we are enormously proud of what we have achieved over the last fifteen years, and thank all our partners, colleagues and staff past and present for their contributions to the organisation. We remain confident that we can continue to demonstrate that we can make heritage work, physically, economically, socially and economically.
