In 2019, the Government identified 100 towns that qualified for additional support in four key areas: transport, broadband connectivity, skills and culture. The latter three, in particular, are closely aligned. Culture, and the skills and digital connections necessary to develop, promote, and sustain it, help build the civic infrastructure to tackle urgent social and economic issues. Equally, a vibrant and diverse cultural life grows the creative economy, attracts and retains the young people who can revive depleted town centres, and bridges socially or fractured or divided semi-urban communities. The case for regeneration in our towns has been radically strengthened by the ongoing crisis of COVID-19: the economic challenges faced by SMEs, retail organisations, and the culture, heritage and creative industries have quickly become urgent. Yet this might also herald a moment of reflection and transformative opportunity in smaller communities in particular, as the new local and digital networks shaped by the collective social, mental, and economic challenges of the pandemic start to emerge. The behavioural and organisational adaptations by governments, businesses, and individuals may well also create a seismic shift in our understanding of how rapidly we can effect change by rethinking long-standing strategies, structures, or practices. This project will scope the role that that emerging and innovative multidisciplinary methodologies can play in allowing us to better understand and develop the contributions that culture can make to civic and economic regeneration. Working at the intersection of the Humanities and Social Sciences, the project team will frame the research in relation to the ongoing changes to the social and economic landscapes of towns, and their immediate challenges post-COVID-19. The project will produce a scoping study and report proposing future research directions, opportunities and priorities which will underpin and drive culture's role in the economic recovery and renewal of towns across the UK. It will focus on four case-study towns, identified from the government's '100 Towns' list, and through the robust local community networks of the Victoria County History project, developing transferable, extensible insights, cross-disciplinary methodologies and approaches. The project brings together researchers in the Humanities with Social Sciences specialists at the Centre for Towns Think Tank, with partners Historic England and the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre led by NESTA. It also includes collaborations with Triodos and Starling banks. At the forefront of applied practice, innovation and disruption in their fields, these partners and collaborators will help us think in radical new ways about the research agenda, and identify mechanisms for dissemination and impact.

Exploring how communities respond to economic and climatic crisis is key for enhancing understanding of resilience in the past and present. This project will explore responses to a deteriorating climate and trade collapse at the end of the Bronze Age in Britain. A major focus is the new social and economic networks that developed and how these made communities resilient in the face of turmoil. This will be achieved by employing a new suite of scientific methods to analyse the very rich, but understudied sites known as middens. Around 800BC Europe suffered great upheaval as the climate deteriorated and economies collapsed, with bronze abruptly losing value. Like the 21st century economic crisis, this first millennium BC boom and bust caused great instability. In southern Britain, society did not shift focus to iron, but rather to agricultural intensification and grand-scale feasting; there was a 'Feasting Age' prior to the Iron Age. The remains of these feasts created some of the most startling archaeological sites ever unearthed. These 'middens' represent the very richest resource of material from British prehistory, some covering an area the size of several football pitches and producing hundreds of thousands of artefacts. These provide the key to understanding socio-economic change during this phase. In spite of the rich archaeological resource and the importance of this transition in shaping society for centuries, we still know remarkably little. The most fundamental change was the breakdown in the bronze trade network, which had controlled the movement of people, ideas and artefacts for centuries. We know very little about the new social and economic networks that emerged and centred on these vast feasts, making society resilient at a time of instability and framing power relations and community interaction right up to the Roman conquest. They are key to understanding not only this transitional phase, but British later prehistory more broadly. New research developments mean that the time is right to address these archaeological problems. Recent excavations have provided a wealth of material to address these issues. In addition, scientific advances mean that we can now establish patterns of human and animal movement with greater precision than was previously possible. Finally, there is a large body of material and a suite of scientific methods that can reconstruct the changing face of society in southern Britain and examine how it remained resilient in the face of economic and climatic deterioration. The project will focus on six middens that date to the Bronze Age-Iron Age transition (c. 800BC-400BC) in two regions: Wiltshire and the Thames Valley. These areas were the epicentres of activity during this phase, hosting vast feasting events evidenced by rich material assemblages. These feasts were at the very centre of the dynamics of a changing society. They provide a focal point for community interaction, forging and consolidating new alliances. They are also the focus of new economic practices, representing hubs for the intensification and trade of agricultural produce. Therefore, using a suite of bioarchaeological techniques, the project will examine the new social and economic networks that developed and, using theoretical models, will examine how they made communities resilient in the face of adversity. Multi-isotope analysis (strontium, sulphur, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen) will reveal where animals and humans came from and how agricultural production was maximised through different husbandry practices and landscape use. This will reconstruct the new inter-community networks and the organisation of the economy and agricultural production, thus revealing the strategies that made communities resilient. It will provide a key case study into responses to socio-economic collapse and will transform understanding of how change at the end of the Bronze Age shaped society in southern Britain for centuries.

Climate change poses an existential threat to all humanity. Understanding this change and adapting to it has become the greatest challenge of our time. From rising sea-levels, more extreme weather events and aridification, the extensive impacts of climate are evident at heritage sites globally and the pace of this change is startling. In most parts of the world the rate of loss is exceeding adaptive capacity and this deficit is only getting worse, especially in the global south. Decisions on conservation and preservation begin with a detailed understanding of a place's vulnerability. The choices made will directly impact that ability to effectively integrate the goals of safeguarding cultural heritage, adapting and mitigating climate change, and driving sustainable development. Previous assessment methodologies must be revised to accurately evaluate the vulnerability of cultural heritage sites and their associated communities in the face of a changing climate. There is an urgent need to develop community-based, quick (and yet effective) new techniques and methodologies, and these must be scalable globally. The CVI Africa Project seeks to address this need. The proposed research project centres on training heritage professionals through piloting a new, protype heritage management methodology known as the Climate Vulnerability Index (CVI) in Africa. CVI provides an assessment of the physical and ecological impacts of current and projected climate change on the heritage values of sites and also provides a high-level assessment of the economic, social and cultural consequences of climate change for the site and the associated community. The Project is designed both to adapt existing methodology to the African cultural context and also draw on African expertise to inform refinements in the general CVI methodology. The CVI Africa project will provide foundational training in vulnerability assessment using the CVI method to train six heritage professionals from low and middle income African countries. It will utilise UK and international expertise to develop and deliver online, transferrable and scalable training resources to training participants. The project will culminate in two workshops in Nigeria (Sukur Cultural Landscape) and Tanzania (The Ruins of Kilwa Kisiwani and Songo Mnara) which are impacted by climate change. These workshops will include the training participants, local and national experts and stakeholders, and international partners and will culminate in a publicly available and locally published report. The project will also foster new relationships and encourage knowledge exchange by bringing together collaborators from many organisations and working with new and existing members of the Climate Heritage Network (CHN), a network of arts, culture and heritage organisations committed to aiding their communities in tackling climate change and achieving the ambitions of the Paris Agreement. These include lead investigators from Queen's University Belfast, Historic Environment Scotland, the University of Highlands and Islands and the African World Heritage Fund. Local partner organisations include the Tanzanian Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism and the Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments. Other international partner organisations include the International Committee on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), Historic England, the International National Trust Organisation (INTO) and the Union of Concerned Scientists who will all play roles in project training and/ or workshop participation. Finally, the project will work with the UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and other similar projects to develop a longer term and sustainable Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) funded workstream, to respond effectively to climate change impacts on cultural heritage focused on developing countries.