What makes Havering important to you?
Heritage Ecosystem Mapping of Havering, London
DO YOU HAVE A CONNECTION TO HAVERING? WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU!
Take part in our survey and help us map the places that make Havering meaningful to you.
To take part in our survey and digital mapping exercise click here!
What makes a place matter? The Heritage Ecosystem Mapping (HEM) project explores the everyday relationships between people and places that give Havering its distinctive character – from historic landmarks and parks to high streets, community spaces and places connected to personal memories. By making these often-overlooked relationships more visible, the research aims to help inform future heritage planning in the borough.
We want local people to tell us what matters to them. The study therefore combines a short online survey exploring people’s connections to Havering with an optional digital mapping exercise, where participants can mark the places, routes and spaces that hold particular significance. Together, these will help us understand where meaningful relationships with place exist, how strong they are, and how they are changing over time.
For this exciting new project we will work closely with Alyssa Walton, London Borough of Havering’s Heritage Projects Officer, to develop a Heritage Ecosystem Mapping (HEM) approach in the borough.
This project is the next step on from our 2025 project Heritage Ecosystems Impact Assessment - a tool which seeks to put the concept of ‘heritage ecosystems’ into practice by capturing the deep relationships of people to places in rural communities. The 2025 pilot project suggested significant potential to adjust this methodology for urban contexts.
The need in Havering has become more critical as the borough recently became the first borough to elect Reform. The transfer from Essex to Greater London in 1965 was cited by Reform voters as initiating a loss of place-identity and uncertainty about Havering's heritage.
Due to these factors, its rapidly growing population, combination of built environment and green spaces, and active cultural scene, Havering is an ideal urban context to apply HEM. In Havering HEM will be used to assess the relationships communities have with their borough and together map existing heritage ecosystems to inform projected policy and planning.
Existing Heritage Impact Assessments primarily focus on listed historical assets and scheduled monuments while Environmental Impact Assessments recognise component parts of ‘place’ such as conservation areas. Yet, neither approach accounts for the co-constitutive relationship between people and places. The resulting gap in knowledge and visibility can lead to people feeling alienated from a rapidly changing space and overlooked.
Our hope is that developing a HEM toolkit in Havering will grow the impact of the research on which it is based and expand the CHRC’s activity into the realm of urban policy.
