Welcome to the North West

From rural landscapes and traditions, to cities and towns which were at the heart of the Industrial Revolution, heritage in the North West is rich and wide-ranging. Across the region, HLF is working with diverse communities to help create a sense of place and identity, and to regenerate communities.

We are keen to work together with local and regional groups to develop projects that will give people a better opportunity to experience, enjoy, care for and protect our heritage. We encourage any organisation which is planning to make an application for a heritage project to seek pre-application advice at an early stage.

If you are not able to access the project enquiry / expression of interest form online, please contact us on 0161 200 8470 and ask to speak to a member of the office or development team.

In April 2011, a team of young people from across the North West came together to create a pop-up installation celebrating their heritage and identity. Watch Diverse Roots and find out more about this inspirational project.

Priority development areas

We have identified a number of priority development areas within the North West. They will be the focus of additional targeted activity by our development staff who will be doing more to raise awareness about Heritage Lottery Fund programmes and supporting local organisations and groups in making applications for grants in these areas. Priority development areas will not receive automatic funding but our aim is to generate a greater number of good quality bids from these areas which will be able to compete with applications from other places.

A number of factors were taken into account in identifying the priority development areas including lower levels of HLF spend so far. The priority development areas in the North West are listed in the right hand column.