World Monuments Fund Announces 2025 Watch: Includes Belfast’s Assembly Rooms… & the Moon!

The World Monuments Fund (WMF) has announced the 25 sites on the 2025 World Monuments Watch.

World Monuments Fund writes:

…This year’s Watch includes a wide variety of cultural heritage sites facing major challenges, such as Gaza’s Historic Urban Fabric; Ukraine’s Teacher’s House in Kyiv; Africa’s Swahili Coast; the Old City of Antakya, Türkiye; and Chapel of the Sorbonne, France. The 25 sites represent 29 countries across five continents and the Moon…

Belfast Assembly Rooms is the 2025 Watch site for the United Kingdom. Built in 1769, it served as a gathering place for political discourse, business and entertainment in Northern Ireland’s largest city. Over its history, the Assembly Rooms hosted significant events, including the 1786 defeat of a proposal to establish a Belfast-based company trading in enslaved Africans and the celebrated 1792 harp assembly. Now vacant and in need of substantial conservation, a campaign led by the Assembly Rooms Alliance seeks to bring the building back into public use, including as a Museum of the Troubles and Peace. This will allow the building to reclaim its role as a space for dialogue, reflection, and learning, honoring Belfast’s history and fostering reconciliation. With the inclusion in the 2025 Watch, World Monuments Fund is joining the campaign and committing to working with all stakeholders towards preserving the building and transforming it into a multi-purpose cultural hub for the people of Belfast. To read more go to the link below:

The Moon

With the dawn of the Space Age, nations made groundbreaking strides in the exploration of the cosmos. Today, the Moon is home to over 90 historic sites where spacecraft have made contact with the lunar surface—including Tranquility Base, the Apollo 11 landing site that preserves over 100 historic artifacts as well as humanity’s first footprints on the Moon. These sites represent humankind’s most extraordinary feats of science, ingenuity, and courage. Yet, as we embark on a new era of space exploration, we must ensure that the traces of these extraordinary milestones in humanity’s history—the first moon landings—are preserved. The inclusion of the Moon on the 2025 Watch advocates for international agreements and protections for lunar heritage sites and invites a broader public conversation on what this new Space Age might mean for the Moon’s cultural and natural landscape.

Read more….

WMF’s full press release

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