"It makes me feel happy that we did it and what came out of it": Recent research into the association of heritage participation with wellbeing

This paper explores insights from recent Historic England-funded research (Lewis et al. 2022; Pattinson et al. 2023) into how and why heritage participation is associated with wellbeing. The research involved thematic analyses of in-depth post-participation interviews with 35 adults who had volunteered on activities funded to support heritage sites previously deemed to be 'at risk'. This paper reviews the six overarching key themes identified as characterising the wellbeing associations in volunteers' responses and then considers in more detail the role of heritagespecifically in wellbeing. Analysis shows that activities funded to benefit heritage can also benefit wellbeing, and indicates that the aspects of wellbeing most often or strongly associated with heritage are those relating to purpose, being, knowledge gain, sharing, psychological benefit and self-actualisation; and that the 'USP' of heritage for wellbeing appears to lie in the force-multiplying interaction of eight cross-cutting characteristics (temporality, discovery, authenticity, continuity, rescue, nostalgia, transformation and legacy) present in the time-focussed eco-system of heritage volunteering.