Vital restoration funding

The Historic Houses Foundation is proud to once again be a delivery partner for the second round of the Heritage Stimulus Fund. Part of the Government’s £2 billion Cultural Recovery Fund, the Heritage Stimulus Fund is helping heritage places recover from the impact of the pandemic, by funding vital restoration projects.

In the first round, the Historic Houses Foundation funded repair and maintenance work at eighteen of the country’s treasured heritage assets and protected the jobs of expert craft workers in the sector. This winter we are distributing £2.1 million on behalf of Historic England to thirteen historic properties who are facing particular challenges as a result of the drop in income occasioned by the pandemic restrictions.

The money will address some serious issues and help these heritage places to be more resilient in the future. Once again, roof repairs top the list with five of the places involved in need of urgent repairs to roofs and chimneys, while two more need the funds to repair vulnerable plasterwork ceilings damaged by water ingress through roofs that have now been repaired.

Urgent repairs to masonry and paving are the other most common category, affecting four of the group including the repair of the masonry supporting the Elizabethan window at the centre of the Long Gallery at Haddon Hall in Derbyshire.

More maverick is the funding of the repair of a rare survival, one of the Sunken Pit houses, part of the continuing restoration of the glasshouses in the Walled Garden at Holkham Hall in Norfolk. Here Victorian gardeners once employed the latest technologies to grow exotics like pineapples for the table. Much of this repair work is unglamorous but it is all essential if we are all to continue to visit these important places and we are delighted that such fundamental maintenance can go ahead after a long period of uncertainty.