WRITING OUR OWN HISTORY

Historic England and Heritage West Midlands organised a workshop at Soho House on 13th June to explain how the public can now add their own knowledge about local listed buildings to the national data base. Louisa Moore of Historic England (which recently took over from English Heritage in administering Listed Buildings) explained that when it comes to Grade 2 listed buildings in particular, which are the large majority, there is a lack of detail about what actually happened in them, and how those buildings related to the lives of local people. Often the existing entries are limited to technical details about construction etc. In order to ‘enrich the list’ you are invited to go to the Historic England website (www.historicengland.org.uk) and make your own entry for a listed building. There are a number of ways to navigate round this site, and the background information is all helpful as a guide to what you can and can’t enter etc. However, if you want to get on and do it you can find yourself going up blind alleys by clicking on headings which sound as if they will take you into the actions for making a contribution when in fact they just give more explanatory text. So here is a sequence which worked:

1. Under the heading ‘Help Chronicle Our Missing History’ on the first page click on ‘Find Out How to Enrich the List’.

2. Go down a little way and click on ‘Share Your Knowledge to Enrich the List’.

3. Scroll down to below the pictures until you find the heading ‘How does it work?’ and under that click on ‘become a contributor’.

You will then be taken through a registration process which will give you a ‘Heritage Passport’. When you have entered your details you will first get a confirmation e-mail which contains links to different parts of the site (one of them lets you suggest a building you think should be listed), and then you will get a second e-mail which gives you a verification code – you can’t actually do anything until you have this code.

5. Click on the blue link in the second e-mail and it will take you to the place where you can find the particular building you are interested in and at the bottom of the existing information you will find where you can make an entry.

There is an e-mail address on the site if you have problems/issues/questions, but Louisa Moore is our local contact in Birmingham and she can be reached on louisa.moore@HistoricEngland.org.uk