You will need to be clear from the start about the needs of your audience, the themes and stories you want to communicate, and the ways to communicate them. For example, the story of a historic building can be told through its place in community or national history, or through the lives of individual people who lived and worked there. If it is carefully considered and planned, your interpretation will open up different pathways to learning for your audience.
The people you want to involve and the story you want to tell are crucial to interpretation, whether your project involves a museum collection, a local wildlife site or any other kind of heritage. No two HLF projects are exactly the same, and there’s a huge wealth of experience to draw on. Here’s how two projects in Derbyshire and Suffolk developed their interpretation in very different contexts.