Abstract

Cambridge Community Heritage (CCH)1 was a Connected Communities project funded by AHRC under the Research for Community Heritage (R4CH)2 call. CCH involved ten University of Cambridge researchers in Archaeology, History, Heritage and Public Engagement in co-produced research collaborations with community groups in eastern England in 2012 and 2013. In 2012 CCH helped 24 community groups develop groups’ own ideas for heritage projects into proposals that they could submit to the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) All Our Stories fund; and subsequently in 2013 CCH worked with 28 successful groups to deliver these projects. CCH projects involved more than 5,000 members of communities of place, occupation, interest and identity including local historical societies, football clubs, church groups, traveller communities, schools, women’s groups and military regiments to explore aspects of their heritage which were important to them. The projects were enthusiastically embraced by communities and generated a wide range of outcomes, receiving excellent feedback from community participants and university researchers alike. This paper reviews the aims and outcomes of Cambridge Community Heritage, analyses the opportunities and challenges encountered in this programme and elicits some of the issues pertaining to sustaining, tracking, identifying and evidencing both short-term impact and longer-term legacies from these projects.