Speech for Councillor Lee 14 July Good morning and a very warm welcome to all of you. Welcome to the Great Northern Hotel and also to Peterborough itself. It is great to see so many people here with an interest in the historic environment and in our heritage. There are some excellent speakers coming up who will be putting the spotlight on some of our city’s hidden treasures and the ongoing work to ensure our heritage assets are preserved and celebrated. I would like to thank to both the Heritage Lottery Fund and Vivacity for supporting today’s conference and Opportunity Peterborough for hosting such a worthwhile event. The subject of today’s conference is about making heritage resilient. In Peterborough we have some fantastic heritage assets and we need to work together to make sure we are making the most of them and showing the rest of the UK, those buildings, parks and green spaces that unlock the secrets of Peterborough’s rich and interesting history. As the Heritage Champion for Peterborough this is something very close to my heart. Like other local authorities, Peterborough City Council owns many of the city’s heritage assets including Peterborough Museum and the Victorian Central Park which has won the prestigious Green Flag for the past eight years. Some of these assets are now managed on our behalf by partner organisations including Vivacity which manages the museum, the Key Theatre, our libraries, sports centres and Flag Fen, one of the best preserved late Bronze Age monumental structures in Britain. Our trees, parks and green open spaces are also managed by Enterprise Peterborough. But Peterborough City Council is still strongly committed to ensuring we maximise our assets and that is why we successfully bid for £3 million to pay for the redevelopment of our museum from the Heritage Lottery Fund which attracted 50,000 visitors last year. We also are investing £100,000 a year over the next three years to Flag Fen. We are also providing grants to restore other historic buildings such as the partnership scheme with English Heritage in the city centre, and as a local planning authority play a key role in ensuring our buildings of the future complement those from the past. As Heritage Champion I am passionate about ensuring that protecting our heritage and ensuring it is considered in our policy and strategy-making. I chair the Heritage Steering Group, which brings together the heritage interests of Peterborough, from the local Civic Society to English Heritage, and currently comprises of about 10 different organisations. Peterborough is often perceived as a new town, but it has a rich and varied heritage comprising of over 1000 listed buildings, 64 scheduled monuments and 29 conservation areas, including the city centre itself. Recently the city council worked alongside parish councils and the civic society to put together a draft local list of over

230 buildings, including the one we are standing in now. This innovative and community led approach will be highlighted in an English heritage case study later this year. The historic environment is vitally important to Peterborough. It underpins local employment and attracts inward investment into the city. A recent study has highlighted that the value of the heritage attractions group to the city in 2010 was over 27 million pounds. This is something we can enhance with new approaches to tourism and new projects, including the Cathedral’s ‘Peterborough 900’ project, launched just a few weeks ago. This innovative project aims to ensure the cathedral remains at the heart of city life by creating a Music Education Centre for the community as well as the Cathedral, upgrading facilities for visitors and pilgrims and establishing ‘drop-in’ facilities for those in need including the homeless, and ex-service personnel (in partnership with Combat Stress). Peterborough’s heritage is a cornerstone for regeneration projects, with the demolition of Norwich Union House, often referred to as the Corn Exchange Building. This has enabled St Johns Church now to be appreciated in its fully glory and the creation of the new green open space in the city centre - St Johns Square as part of the city centre regeneration. If you join us later for the evening reception, and I do hope you will do so, you will be able to see inside St Johns, a Grade 1 listed church dating back at 1407. 2011 is an historic year for the Museum as it undergoes a 12-month redevelopment that has been funded by Vivacity, Peterborough City Council and the Heritage Lottery Fund. On Christmas Eve 2010 museum staff waved off their final visitors until early 2012 when the redevelopment project is due to be complete. However, although the building will be closed, the museum service will continue throughout the year, as staff take the museum out on tour to venues across the city. Peterborough Museum is one of the city’s most popular attractions, along with the Cathedral, Nene Valley Railway and Sacrewell Farm – each of which get over 60,000 visitors per year. Peterborough Museum is in one of the city’s most historic buildings, which dates back to the Georgian era, and on the site of an earlier Tudor property. Vivacity has also recently taken on the management of Flag Fen Bronze Age site, and we will be working hard to maximise its true potential attracting visitors from far and wide to a world class site. Peterborough city centre is predominantly of Victorian and Georgian stock with some older timber framed buildings, and of course the Cathedral. The Cathedral and its precincts are a source of pride and an important part of the local identity of the city. Its iconic image is regular used as a symbol for the city in organisation logos and branding including the recently launched partnership with Enterprise Peterborough, which now carries out the city’s waste collection services and manages our parks and green spaces on behalf of the council.

The cathedral and the newly revamped Cathedral Square featured prominently in a marketing campaign in London to attract investment into Peterborough. The historic environment is great for providing skills, training and educational opportunities within the city. Local initiatives, to work with young people who were not in education, employment and training, to teach them traditional skills proved a great success. Young people were taught dry stone walling and hedge-laying to name just a few of the traditional skills that are still required to maintain some of the rural areas of the city. Schools regularly take visits out to the heritage sites where they can try out all sorts of hands-on experiences. They can take a peek inside a Bronze Age or Iron Age Roundhouse or learn where their food comes from. To get local people interested in their heritage we have the annual Heritage Festival, which took place a few weeks ago. Over 20,000 people attending a wide variety of events, from eminent historian and BBC broadcaster Dr David Starkey to falconry displays. Heritage Open Days, coming up in September are supported by the city council and the Civic Society and Vivacity, and provide a brilliant opportunity for people to see the sites for free, including this year, the 14th century Longthorpe Tower, one of Britain’s top 100 buildings, according to a new book. The replacement body for the Civic Trust, Civic Voice, held their first annual meeting in this venue last year, and they helped to showcase the high levels of interest in the historic environment from groups across the country. Delegates then enjoyed their day in Peterborough, as I hope you shall. Thank you!