'You Can't Move History. You Can Secure the Future': Engaging Youth in Cultural Heritage

'You Can't Move History. You Can Secure the Future' is a tag line used by the Long Live South Bank (LLSB) campaign to encapsulate a distinctive heritage claim aimed at retaining the informal skate spot in the Undercroft on London's South Bank. The campaign will provide the basis for a critical investigation of young people's involvement in heritage issues with the aim of learning how we can promote a positive approach to a more plural conceptualisation of heritage. Until now, the involvement of youth in heritage debates has typically been as part of a rhetorical strategy that serves to speak for them as future stakeholders; as in 'we are preserving the heritage for future generations'. The ongoing LLSB campaign, however, demonstrates youth as highly engaged political subjects capable of defining their own heritages as part of their own claims to urban space. In response to the AHRC's Care for the Future theme, this project explores the changing means by which particular forms and uses of the built environment become seen as so valuable that they deserve protection for the benefit of future generations, with the LLSB campaign viewed as a pathfinder in this regard. Efforts to conserve the historic environment in the UK are faced by a shift away from traditional sources of legitimacy based on consensual and universal definitions of what counts as heritage towards more recognition of the diverse ways in which different communities may engage with and value their local environment. This pluralisation of heritage presents opportunities for the formal recognition of previously marginalised heritages. Research is therefore needed if we are to understand the inter-relationships between (sub) cultural groups and their local environment. Furthermore, we need to build on existing literature on how conservation communicates values and practices across generations to ask whether traditional conservation approaches and tools continue to be appropriate for the new forms of cultural heritage they may be applied to. Employing expertise across the fields of History, Town Planning, Media Studies and Sociology, this project will analyse the long-running and ongoing political, economic and cultural struggles over the use and significance of the Southbank site. We will work with the youth filmmaking collective Brazen Bunch to record walking interviews and oral histories with LLSB, Coin Street Community Builders and the Twentieth Century Society, all of whom have indicated their willingness to participate in the project. We will take the same approach to engaging with a range of other stakeholders including BMX bikers, photographers and graffiti artists. This material will be analysed alongside LLSB campaign documents and films; official and alternative plans and planning documents; and print media and film archives, resulting in two journal articles to be published in key media/cultural studies and heritage journals utilising this case study to challenge dominant assumptions about youth's engagement with heritage issues in the past and present, and making recommendations on how youth might be engaged in caring for their future. The footage will also be edited, with the Brazen Bunch filmmakers, into a short film that will be used to engage key heritage and planning organisations in a workshop discussion about the ways in which young people relate to heritage. We will work with the Heritage Lottery Fund to place the findings of the Southbank Undercroft into the context of their innovative 'Young Roots' programme by drawing out key themes and debating them at the workshop. This will then form the basis of a report in which the key findings of the Undercroft and Young Roots will be considered alongside existing academic and policy literatures to suggest ways in which young people's involvement in heritage could be further incorporated in the formal heritage system.