Dame Jenny Abramsky, 67, is stepping down after six years as chair of the Lottery Fund and in an interview with the Telegraph says that “heritage is so much more than beautiful buildings.”
The Telegraph writes:
The headquarters of the Heritage Lottery Fund are based in what may be the unloveliest building in Chelsea. It sticks out like a sore thumb among the elegant squares and Victorian mansion blocks that grace this part of town. But it also fits rather well with Dame Jenny Abramsky’s mission statement. “I feel very strongly,” she says, “that heritage is so much more than beautiful buildings.”
“My definition is really anything that people value and that they want to hand on to the future. That can be a memory, a culture, a butterfly in Yorkshire or a fantastic landscape in Scotland, as well as a building that has been derelict in the centre of a small community and which, if they could just turn it into something, would transform that community.
“If you talk to ordinary people, it’s very much about the urban landscape in which they live.” She gives an example of M Shed in Bristol, a dockside museum charting the history of the city. Part of the HLF grant helped save two cranes that stand nearby. “They were going to get rid of them. Local people said: ‘But they represent who we are in Bristol.’ It would have been a tragedy if they’d gone.”
Dame Jenny, 67, is standing down next month. Her one sadness is the number of worthy applications the HLF has to turn down. Eight years ago, it funded 70 per cent of applications. Now the figure is 35 per cent. “Sadly we’re having meetings where we have 10 projects that meet all the criteria and we only have the money for four. And we’re probably the only game in town now.”
In her swansong public speech, she warned this is “a pivotal moment for the heritage sector”, which has seen government and other cuts of £2 billion since 2010.
