Recent reviews of the historic environment, such as Power of Place (English Heritage 2000) and A Force for our Future (DCMS 2001) have emphasised the importance of heritage playing an active part in enriching everyone’s lives and in the development of sustainable communities. The material remains of the very recent and remembered past hold very great potential to contribute to achieving such goals, but remain almost entirely unexplored. Meanwhile, archaeologists around the world are increasingly recognising that by looking at landscapes and material culture they can contribute to studies by historians, sociologists, geographers and others of the 20th century.

The Change and Creation programme engages with later 20th century materal as a major, diverse and unprotected cultural resource which is widely valued across the country. So far, it has been developed by a collective of heritage professionals and academics - Graham Fairclough and John Schofield (English Heritage Characterisation Team), Janet Miller and Andrea Bradley (Atkins Heritage), Dan Hicks (University of Bristol) and Victor Buchli (University College London). A programme discussion document was published in Autumn 2004, and explores the many versions of England in the 20th century, celebrating the diversity and contested nature of the very recent and contemporary past.

Managing and characterising the remains of the later 20th century landscape raises many new questions - of value, interdisciplinarity and the limits of archaeology. Managing and researching the very recent past opens up possibilities to employ unusual new methods in archaeology and heritage - engagements with artistic and creative practices, film making and stills photography, oral histories of particular landscapes, interviews, ethnography and public programmes alongside more traditional archaeological research and fieldwork.

Change and Creation aims to promote public and professional dialogue about the remains of the later 20th century across the English landscape - whether they are valued, disliked, forgotten or neglected. A series of workshops and conferences with with public and community groups and professional partners, such as universities, local authorities and other are planned. Through this period of dialogue and consultation, a series of programme themes for exploring the later 20th century landscape will be developed. Your contributions to this process are invited.

Programme Outputs

The programme will result in the following:

• A GIS-based national characterisation of the late 20th century layer of England’s landscape palimpsest
  
• Illustrated reports for each Programme theme.
• Detailed Characterisation Descriptions for particular types of landscape.
• A document considering methodologies for assessment of 20th century landscape, including tested methods of public perception surveys with regard to the landscape of the recent past
• A scoping document, with priorities for further characterisation projects within the Programme and an agenda for further research
• The dissemination of the Programme results through web-based material and book publications.
• The promotion of interdiciplinary research projects based around the project themes.
• The provision of a point of connection between exisiting later 20th century archaeology projects.