Port Sunlight World Heritage Site Status
The Port Sunlight Village Trust were embarking on the process to gain inscription for the Port Sunlight Village as a World Heritage Site. This is a long process which first involves application to the UK Government to be included on the UK Tentative List. As they begin what could be a decade long process, they wanted to know more about how the local communities, both in Port Sunlight and those nearby, felt about the proposals.
PLACED worked directly with the Port Sunlight Village Trust team to create information materials to share information and collect views.
What we did
PLACED, working with the Port Sunlight Village Trust, hosted three pop-ups in Bebington, New Ferry and Port Sunlight. The pop-up events shared information on the project, provided local people with opportunities to ask questions of the Port Sunlight Village Trust team who join all of the events, and gave opportunities for local people to provide feedback.
Alongside this to promote the events and share information we created and shared a leaflet which was delivered to all residents in Port Sunlight and shared digitally with neighbouring communities. The leaflet explained the process of achieving World Heritage Status and answered some frequently asked questions.
Running parallel was an online survey which enabled people who perhaps couldn’t attend an event to also share their views.
Outcome
We were able to collate and present back a broad range of views on the project, approximately 250 people took part!
We created an infographic to readily share the headline findings from the community engagement and have been able to produce a longer form report which will be published by Port Sunlight Village Trust.
This engagement helped the Village Trust to establish local people’s concerns and they can now work on how best to respond and take account of that information as they work through the process for World Heritage Site status.